12 ms·

At a quick glance, I found several that don't match that criteria you mention, here are a few: Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds https://codeengine

At a quick glance, I found several that don't match that criteria you mention, here are a few: Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-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 https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough Avoid Async Rust at All Cost https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html 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.

nottorp 3y ago
YMMV. I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic statements. At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.
- threatofrain 3y ago
  It's dubious that HN mods think that way of Altman though.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    s/mods/users? everyone can flag stories.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      It's not flags (or not sufficient to remove the story): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
      - lolinder 3y ago
        Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the comment you linked to: I have many times been the person who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it immediately disappear. I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
  - dang 3y ago
    I like Sam, but "$celebrity says $thing about $common-topic" is almost never a good basis for a frontpage thread on HN. It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
- jjackson5324 3y ago
  > I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic statements His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....? He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture). Training a model of that size would require too much electricity. That was his point.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
passwordoops 3y ago
The Altman story was likely a dupe (or triplicate)
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Why not redirect to the original story?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    moderators are not omnipresent, and some times the users are faster to react than the mods.
  - hk__2 3y ago
    Is that possible?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Dupes generally drop off the front page, whether or not someone links up the previous stories in the thread. The whole point is not to let the duplicate story crowd out other stories on the front page. Redirecting would defeat the purpose.
  - dang 3y ago
    We do redirect to earlier posts that had the exact same URL. But most dupes, in the sense of repeated posts about the same story, don't have the exact same URL. What do you do then? That's a hard problem. It would be great to have an automated solution to that but I don't know of one.
    - dontupvoteme 3y ago
      sorry for replying late, thanks for the reply - [0] ... that is a hard question, something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity on the bulletpoints? could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are both sufficiently simultaneous about baz? .... is there any dataset one might be able to play around with on this topic? [0] there's like 3 good mods left online and you are one of them, so thanks for that.
wiredfool 3y ago
Possibly dups too.
elpocko 3y ago
The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You will notice the effect after participating for a while.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day. It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
  - elpocko 3y ago
    The "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you, either.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      If it works.. There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - nkurz 3y ago
      Could you make your accusation more clearly? Are you saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy figures who have no public presence?
hobofan 3y ago
The last story is so full of outdated and misinformation that I tried to find out whether it was written a few years ago (though it would have still been full of misinformation back then). I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.
Zak 3y ago
Two out of three currently aren't removed. There's no moderator comment on the third, but a fair number of upvotes and user comments; I think it was flagged by users. Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738 Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Two out of three currently aren't removed How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
- flutas 3y ago
  There's a difference between removed and removed from the front page. IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page. That's a big change?
- throwaway665544 3y ago
  HN is a leftist echo chamber, so “flagged by users” is still a relevant and interesting metric here (that I think would also prove my point).
wolverine876 3y ago
I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has). All from only one day: * Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-screen-display-size-os-apps-gaming-lincoln https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr... * Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany about a far-right planning meeting): https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-against-germany/ https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-... * Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/ https://vxdev.pages.dev/ * Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/ https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
- lolinder 3y ago
  What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags. Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown. I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread). Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative' Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.
dang 3y ago
The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them. Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - comex 3y ago
    By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it. That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that a community member's post "gracefully omits" some information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a productive discussion.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      Of course, it's only inflammatory because async is a darling to more than half of HN :) But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
  - dang 3y ago
    I assume you mean this one: Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments) I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons. I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is! > Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse? There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well. We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse. Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers. --- [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=async%20rust%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread! [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments) Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments) New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments) Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments) Code will make me rich and famous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments) The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments) Leaving the Web3 cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments) How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments) Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments) Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)
mikysco 3y ago
Sam Altman led invests in a nuclear fusion company, Helion. Guessing the potential conflict of interest is why the 2nd article drew vote controversy. https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million-fundraise/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million...
- dang 3y ago
  This is the kind of explanation that makes sense when the association happens to come to mind—in this case, something like: HN -> YC -> Sam -> Helios -> nuclear -> obvious conflict of interest -> QED. But such chains of associations rarely have anything to do with what happened to a story on HN. The explanation is almost certainly much simpler. In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nottorp 3y ago

YMMV. I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic statements. At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.

threatofrain 3y ago
It's dubious that HN mods think that way of Altman though.
- nottorp 3y ago
  s/mods/users? everyone can flag stories.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    It's not flags (or not sufficient to remove the story): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the comment you linked to: I have many times been the person who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it immediately disappear. I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
- dang 3y ago
  I like Sam, but "$celebrity says $thing about $common-topic" is almost never a good basis for a frontpage thread on HN. It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
jjackson5324 3y ago
> I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic statements His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....? He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture). Training a model of that size would require too much electricity. That was his point.
- nottorp 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

passwordoops 3y ago

The Altman story was likely a dupe (or triplicate)

dontupvoteme 3y ago
Why not redirect to the original story?
- dylan604 3y ago
  moderators are not omnipresent, and some times the users are faster to react than the mods.
- hk__2 3y ago
  Is that possible?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Dupes generally drop off the front page, whether or not someone links up the previous stories in the thread. The whole point is not to let the duplicate story crowd out other stories on the front page. Redirecting would defeat the purpose.
- dang 3y ago
  We do redirect to earlier posts that had the exact same URL. But most dupes, in the sense of repeated posts about the same story, don't have the exact same URL. What do you do then? That's a hard problem. It would be great to have an automated solution to that but I don't know of one.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    sorry for replying late, thanks for the reply - [0] ... that is a hard question, something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity on the bulletpoints? could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are both sufficiently simultaneous about baz? .... is there any dataset one might be able to play around with on this topic? [0] there's like 3 good mods left online and you are one of them, so thanks for that.

wiredfool 3y ago

Possibly dups too.

elpocko 3y ago

The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You will notice the effect after participating for a while.

bitcharmer 3y ago
Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day. It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
- elpocko 3y ago
  The "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you, either.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    If it works.. There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - nkurz 3y ago
    Could you make your accusation more clearly? Are you saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy figures who have no public presence?

hobofan 3y ago

The last story is so full of outdated and misinformation that I tried to find out whether it was written a few years ago (though it would have still been full of misinformation back then). I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.

Zak 3y ago

Two out of three currently aren't removed. There's no moderator comment on the third, but a fair number of upvotes and user comments; I think it was flagged by users. Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738 Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078

wolverine876 3y ago
> Two out of three currently aren't removed How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
flutas 3y ago
There's a difference between removed and removed from the front page. IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page. That's a big change?
throwaway665544 3y ago
HN is a leftist echo chamber, so “flagged by users” is still a relevant and interesting metric here (that I think would also prove my point).

wolverine876 3y ago

I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has). All from only one day: * Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-screen-display-size-os-apps-gaming-lincoln https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr... * Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany about a far-right planning meeting): https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-against-germany/ https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-... * Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/ https://vxdev.pages.dev/ * Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/ https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/

lolinder 3y ago
What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags. Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown. I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread). Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.
- 23B1 3y ago
  I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative' Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.

dang 3y ago

The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them. Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.

jeremyjh 3y ago
The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- comex 3y ago
  By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it. That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that a community member's post "gracefully omits" some information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a productive discussion.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Of course, it's only inflammatory because async is a darling to more than half of HN :) But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
- dang 3y ago
  I assume you mean this one: Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments) I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons. I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is! > Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse? There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well. We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse. Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers. --- [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=async%20rust%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread! [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments) Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments) New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments) Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments) Code will make me rich and famous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments) The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments) Leaving the Web3 cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments) How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments) Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments) Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)

mikysco 3y ago

Sam Altman led invests in a nuclear fusion company, Helion. Guessing the potential conflict of interest is why the 2nd article drew vote controversy. https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million-fundraise/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million...

dang 3y ago
This is the kind of explanation that makes sense when the association happens to come to mind—in this case, something like: HN -> YC -> Sam -> Helios -> nuclear -> obvious conflict of interest -> QED. But such chains of associations rarely have anything to do with what happened to a story on HN. The explanation is almost certainly much simpler. In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.

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