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Despite my low level of contribution to this site, I must say I'm tired of seeing WikiLeaks/Assange on the Hacker News front page. Granted, all this may be news

by tung 16y ago

Despite my low level of contribution to this site, I must say I'm tired of seeing WikiLeaks/Assange on the Hacker News front page. Granted, all this may be newsworthy, but going by the Hacker News Guidelines, it feels more "Off-Topic" than on, in that it's about politics and would be covered on TV news, like the TSA submissions a while ago.

garply 16y ago
I don't think this story is off-topic. Most of us are interested in how technology is changing the world around us. That means something on-topic can be about how new technology is affecting medical practice (for example, potential advances against tooth decay) or about how it is affecting politics (in this case, increasing governmental vulnerability to widespread dissemination of secret information).
- tung 16y ago
  It looks like more people agree with you than me, so I'll take the opportunity to at least explain my point of view. I come to Hacker News to see people talk about technology, innovation, trends, start-ups and tiny projects that pop up that do things that seem so obvious in hind-sight, but are in fact really clever. This recent news about WikiLeaks and Assange I feel don't really fit in any of these categories. The Hacker News Guidelines [1] may be open to interpretation, but it does explicitly state: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics and > If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. There is a bit after the first quote that states "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon," which I suppose is where we disagree. Nonetheless, if you and others feel it fits here, I'll respect your opinions. [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Uchikoma 16y ago
    When your startup is terminted on PayPal or AWS on dubious ground, come back and leave a comment.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >When your startup is terminted on PayPal or AWS on dubious ground, come back and leave a comment. If that was what this post was about then you'd have a point. Wikileaks and Assange's private life are almost entirely orthogonal IMO.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    The world is changing around us. Thanks, in large part, to a hacker. It doesn't get much more on topic than that. It's also a very interesting new phenomenon.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    You mean as opposed to say mountain climbing, dietary habits or aspirin ? I don't see you complaining about things being 'off topic' in those threads.
    - tung 16y ago
      I might if there are another 20 of them over the next week or two, and they aren't about combining them into an astonishing new mountain climbing strategy that involves aspirin-based dietary habits. :)
    - nerfhammer 16y ago
      I also don't see countless near-dupes of those threads being upvoted
      - billswift 16y ago
        And then killed.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      Come off it, you expect him to comment in every thread that he believes is off-topic? This sort of argument should have a name (I'm sure it does) - "but gov, you didn't complain last time I cleaned your windows badly".
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        No, it's just that those are far more off-topic than this one.
        pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        Off-topic is largely subjective though and there were about a million submitted posts on the same topic. One post can be ignored, multiple posts on the same topic that one finds off-topic probably warrants a comment. Oh and one more thing: topic, topic, topic topic.
  - duck 16y ago
    I think what you find on HN is that these fit into grey areas, and basically the community decides on if they stay on the home page or not. How I look at it is that you are never going to be reading all the articles on the front page right? So if this doesn't interest you it is as simple as skipping it. If one day there is 15+ of these type of grey area links on HN, then that will be a problem, but I just don't see that happening.
    - tung 16y ago
      I suppose you're right. I just felt frustrated seeing the same topic over and over, and wondered if anybody agreed. On the whole, Hacker News is a great place, arguably the best of the news aggregation sites on the Internet. Even people who disagree with me here have upvoted other excellent submissions and posted excellent comments, so I'll at least thank them and the community as a whole for those.
  - Jach 16y ago
    The great thing about HN: there's so many good submissions. Don't like what's on the front page? Check out a page or two after it, or put a feed on new submissions. You don't have to read the stories and comment threads about Wikileaks, you know. And when you get more karma, you can even start flagging things! (I don't know the karma threshold.)
xentronium 16y ago
I don't agree, since wikileaks is all about freedom of information, which has the highest possible value for a hacker; while TSA stuff is more about law and law enforcement. Both of those topics have nice subtle 1984-ish smell, though.
- jyoti00 16y ago
  "wikileaks is all about freedom of information..." I don't want to hurt any hacker's emotions but I feel "freedom of information" should end where it endangers those people's lives who are working for their countries, whether soldiers or diplomats. Freedom of information and expose MUST be for common man's good, not just for gaining publicity. Expose the wrong, not the mundane.Otherwise it's pure eavesdropping and bragging about your power to do so. Diplomacy IS "the art and practice of conducting negotiations between nations" (as defined by Merriam Webster dictionary). That is precisely what all the exposed diplomatic cables were doing.Anything wrong with that? If I study hard to get a job in foreign services and someday, somewhere, someone decides to divulge my confidential, professional conversations just for the heck of it, and it destroys my reputation then what it should be called? Expose or public titillation? And if freedom of information or "openness" is so vital then why WikiLeak's founder guards his privacy so fiercely? One rule for others, one for himself?
  - gloob 16y ago
    You make two points: * "freedom of information should end where it endangers...people's lives" * "expose the wrong, not the mundane" Forgive me if I'm just being naive, but: wouldn't exposing the wrong be way, way more likely to endanger people's lives? And, contrariwise, if this is all information everyone already knew -- why is anyone's life in danger from everyone being told about it?
  - pygy_ 16y ago
    ... I feel "freedom of information" should end where it endangers those people's lives who are working for their countries ... Who exactly has been endangered by the leaks? No concrete example has been given so far, and if there had been any, the US government would have jumped on the occasion to demonize Wikileaks even more. Without any proof, those allegations amount to FUD and hypocrisy, since the death toll caused by the US government is considerable. Taking the Irak war as an example (but others abound, e.g. Chile or Vietnam): Bush attacked Irak based on lies, and, by 2006, the war had caused 654,965 excess deaths (direct and indirect casualties) [1]. I couldn't find a more recent estimate, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number had doubled by now. Now that is a big death toll caused by hidden information, isn't it? -- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casu...
Bootvis 16y ago
Do not downvote if you don't agree. He raises a valid point (with which I myself don't fuly agree but it's a valid point nonetheless).
rmc 16y ago
One very on-topic part of this wikileaks saga is Amazon and PayPal's reactions. If you are running your start up on them, you have to be careful now.
ugh 16y ago
I think it’s mostly a problem with how Hacker News works and that, to a certain extent, there is no way around it. I would think that a detailed 10,000 word article about recent Wikileaks developments every three months or so with an accompanying extensive discussion would be entirely appropriate. Not too much and not too little. The problem is that social news sites don’t have that kind of foresight. That’s why we so often end up with this uncomfortable decision between accepting a topic and the accompanying occasional article avalanches or locking out a topic completely, neither of which seems entirely appropriate Wikileaks on Hacker News.
kds 16y ago
Assange is a hacker and WikiLeaks is a start-up though not in the usual money-making PG-esque business sense. The site had - and I guess it still has - some non-trivial (at least at such scale of pressure and exposure) operational issues: DoS attacks, denials of DNS service, hosting refusals, bank-accounts freezings, institutional threatening reactions from the mightiest states in the world... ...and yet it's still on-line under different URLs and mirrors. Isn't that a true hackers' achievement worthy for discussing here at length? I'm not quite sure, of course, but maybe hundreds of future PhDs in the history and political sciences - getting their degrees in the very same elite universities whose alumni now rule in US & UK - will be indebted to this man and this project that shed light on all the data. Just think about that.
wmeredith 16y ago
Head to the new page and vote on some stuff you like.

by tung 16y ago

garply 16y ago

I don't think this story is off-topic. Most of us are interested in how technology is changing the world around us. That means something on-topic can be about how new technology is affecting medical practice (for example, potential advances against tooth decay) or about how it is affecting politics (in this case, increasing governmental vulnerability to widespread dissemination of secret information).

tung 16y ago
It looks like more people agree with you than me, so I'll take the opportunity to at least explain my point of view. I come to Hacker News to see people talk about technology, innovation, trends, start-ups and tiny projects that pop up that do things that seem so obvious in hind-sight, but are in fact really clever. This recent news about WikiLeaks and Assange I feel don't really fit in any of these categories. The Hacker News Guidelines [1] may be open to interpretation, but it does explicitly state: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics and > If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. There is a bit after the first quote that states "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon," which I suppose is where we disagree. Nonetheless, if you and others feel it fits here, I'll respect your opinions. [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Uchikoma 16y ago
  When your startup is terminted on PayPal or AWS on dubious ground, come back and leave a comment.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >When your startup is terminted on PayPal or AWS on dubious ground, come back and leave a comment. If that was what this post was about then you'd have a point. Wikileaks and Assange's private life are almost entirely orthogonal IMO.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  The world is changing around us. Thanks, in large part, to a hacker. It doesn't get much more on topic than that. It's also a very interesting new phenomenon.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  You mean as opposed to say mountain climbing, dietary habits or aspirin ? I don't see you complaining about things being 'off topic' in those threads.
  - tung 16y ago
    I might if there are another 20 of them over the next week or two, and they aren't about combining them into an astonishing new mountain climbing strategy that involves aspirin-based dietary habits. :)
  - nerfhammer 16y ago
    I also don't see countless near-dupes of those threads being upvoted
    - billswift 16y ago
      And then killed.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    Come off it, you expect him to comment in every thread that he believes is off-topic? This sort of argument should have a name (I'm sure it does) - "but gov, you didn't complain last time I cleaned your windows badly".
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      No, it's just that those are far more off-topic than this one.
      - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        Off-topic is largely subjective though and there were about a million submitted posts on the same topic. One post can be ignored, multiple posts on the same topic that one finds off-topic probably warrants a comment. Oh and one more thing: topic, topic, topic topic.
- duck 16y ago
  I think what you find on HN is that these fit into grey areas, and basically the community decides on if they stay on the home page or not. How I look at it is that you are never going to be reading all the articles on the front page right? So if this doesn't interest you it is as simple as skipping it. If one day there is 15+ of these type of grey area links on HN, then that will be a problem, but I just don't see that happening.
  - tung 16y ago
    I suppose you're right. I just felt frustrated seeing the same topic over and over, and wondered if anybody agreed. On the whole, Hacker News is a great place, arguably the best of the news aggregation sites on the Internet. Even people who disagree with me here have upvoted other excellent submissions and posted excellent comments, so I'll at least thank them and the community as a whole for those.
- Jach 16y ago
  The great thing about HN: there's so many good submissions. Don't like what's on the front page? Check out a page or two after it, or put a feed on new submissions. You don't have to read the stories and comment threads about Wikileaks, you know. And when you get more karma, you can even start flagging things! (I don't know the karma threshold.)

xentronium 16y ago

I don't agree, since wikileaks is all about freedom of information, which has the highest possible value for a hacker; while TSA stuff is more about law and law enforcement. Both of those topics have nice subtle 1984-ish smell, though.

jyoti00 16y ago
"wikileaks is all about freedom of information..." I don't want to hurt any hacker's emotions but I feel "freedom of information" should end where it endangers those people's lives who are working for their countries, whether soldiers or diplomats. Freedom of information and expose MUST be for common man's good, not just for gaining publicity. Expose the wrong, not the mundane.Otherwise it's pure eavesdropping and bragging about your power to do so. Diplomacy IS "the art and practice of conducting negotiations between nations" (as defined by Merriam Webster dictionary). That is precisely what all the exposed diplomatic cables were doing.Anything wrong with that? If I study hard to get a job in foreign services and someday, somewhere, someone decides to divulge my confidential, professional conversations just for the heck of it, and it destroys my reputation then what it should be called? Expose or public titillation? And if freedom of information or "openness" is so vital then why WikiLeak's founder guards his privacy so fiercely? One rule for others, one for himself?
- gloob 16y ago
  You make two points: * "freedom of information should end where it endangers...people's lives" * "expose the wrong, not the mundane" Forgive me if I'm just being naive, but: wouldn't exposing the wrong be way, way more likely to endanger people's lives? And, contrariwise, if this is all information everyone already knew -- why is anyone's life in danger from everyone being told about it?
- pygy_ 16y ago
  ... I feel "freedom of information" should end where it endangers those people's lives who are working for their countries ... Who exactly has been endangered by the leaks? No concrete example has been given so far, and if there had been any, the US government would have jumped on the occasion to demonize Wikileaks even more. Without any proof, those allegations amount to FUD and hypocrisy, since the death toll caused by the US government is considerable. Taking the Irak war as an example (but others abound, e.g. Chile or Vietnam): Bush attacked Irak based on lies, and, by 2006, the war had caused 654,965 excess deaths (direct and indirect casualties) [1]. I couldn't find a more recent estimate, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number had doubled by now. Now that is a big death toll caused by hidden information, isn't it? -- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casu...

Bootvis 16y ago

Do not downvote if you don't agree. He raises a valid point (with which I myself don't fuly agree but it's a valid point nonetheless).

rmc 16y ago

One very on-topic part of this wikileaks saga is Amazon and PayPal's reactions. If you are running your start up on them, you have to be careful now.

ugh 16y ago

I think it’s mostly a problem with how Hacker News works and that, to a certain extent, there is no way around it. I would think that a detailed 10,000 word article about recent Wikileaks developments every three months or so with an accompanying extensive discussion would be entirely appropriate. Not too much and not too little. The problem is that social news sites don’t have that kind of foresight. That’s why we so often end up with this uncomfortable decision between accepting a topic and the accompanying occasional article avalanches or locking out a topic completely, neither of which seems entirely appropriate Wikileaks on Hacker News.

kds 16y ago

Assange is a hacker and WikiLeaks is a start-up though not in the usual money-making PG-esque business sense. The site had - and I guess it still has - some non-trivial (at least at such scale of pressure and exposure) operational issues: DoS attacks, denials of DNS service, hosting refusals, bank-accounts freezings, institutional threatening reactions from the mightiest states in the world... ...and yet it's still on-line under different URLs and mirrors. Isn't that a true hackers' achievement worthy for discussing here at length? I'm not quite sure, of course, but maybe hundreds of future PhDs in the history and political sciences - getting their degrees in the very same elite universities whose alumni now rule in US & UK - will be indebted to this man and this project that shed light on all the data. Just think about that.

wmeredith 16y ago

Head to the new page and vote on some stuff you like.