9 ms·

Balaji Srinivasan calls for tech to "exit democracy" and seize local governments

139 points by jaysonelliot 2y ago

johnea 2y ago
I didn't know Garry Tan, the current Y Combinator CEO, was such a nut job... The quotes cited are straight up fascism...
- consumer451 2y ago
  As I love this website, and the societal benefit which real YC disruption has accomplished, so very much, I wish that I could disagree with you. I must be misunderstanding something. Please someone explain this to me.
koolba 2y ago
> Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”). So a reverse CHAZ?
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  It's either this or face another Nika riot of 532.
intellectronica 2y ago
I haven't been to SF since many years. Is it really that bad? Moving around, especially for rich tech people, especially within the US and the developed world in general, is really easy. If SF is really such a catastrophe, why are so many still there? To me it sounds a bit like some of the tech bros want to get into politics as a hobby and they picked this issue because it's especially salient to them. From far away it looks ... bizarre.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > it sounds a bit like some of the tech bros want to get into politics as a hobby and they picked this issue because it's especially salient to them It's pretty much this. SF has issues, but a lot of that is visible only because the Financial District directly neighbors the poorest part of the city (Tenderloin, 6th street, civic center)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Yeah. I’ve been there less recently than I used to go. Maybe the last time I was at the Moscone for an event I was sort of steeling myself for the zombie apocalypse. And yeah it’s not great around there and Union Square. I usually stay towards the Ferry Building to avoid the worst. But it’s not IMO much worse than it’s been for years and years.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Yep. I think most recent Bay Area transplants got used to how clean and shiny SF was in the 2010-17 period, which was inherently an anomaly in SF's history. It's always had a transient issue, and the high availability of support resource, the conversions of RSOs into hotels and airbnbs made visible, and the increased gentrification of SF (upper middle class white collar families didn't live in Mission, much of the SoMA-Potrero flatlands, much of Castro, etc until the 2010s) made these extremely visible. Now that hybrid work has been normalized, I expect to see housing in the inner city (Tenderloin, Union Square) portion of SF to become significantly affordable, as those boutique hotels are returning to their RSO roots. And it already has based on the lack of rent increases with my former landlord's management company (all the 1-2 bdrms their renting out have stabilized in the $1500-2000/mo range in the inner city areas) The city still has a lot of value in the tech ecosystem, but there's a reason the tech industry is called "Silicon Valley", not San Francisco. The gravity has always been in Santa Clara County, and always will be, but now San Francisco County has a decent bigtech scene as well (which didn't really exist there before the 2000s).
consumer451 2y ago
This is so insane that it’s hard to believe.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I had to check if it was April 1. Any of the creators of the "Silicon Valley" TV show want a pitch for a new season?
- photonthug 2y ago
  Impressive, this is some of the most absolutely batshit crazy ranting I have seen in quite a while, and one of my hobbies is talking to crazy people. I assume “grays” is riffing on the alleged alien type, and truly the whole master plan is like a caricature of a conspiracy theory. Yes fellow humans, you enjoy your so called “banquets” do you not? Prepare to submit to my rule!
  - spencerflem 2y ago
    Greys is a reference to Slate Star Codex: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... Originally described in 2014 as: "typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins- style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time" But since then the tech world went off the deep end into anti-wokeness and the left has (rightfully imo) come to resent tech and tech companies so they've moved to be on the side of the "red tribe"
    - kmeisthax 2y ago
      The funny thing is, the red tribe hates them anyway. Trump isn't a tech guy, he's a politically untreatable NPD[1] case, and he only values sycophants that will stay consistently loyal to him. Big Tech banning Trump off social media[0] means that, whether they wanted to or not, they took the blue tribe's side. And of course, blue tribe hates them, too. Grey tribe's social progressiveness is mostly an accident. They're perfectly fine selling weapons to war criminals just as much as they're fine selling lattes at a gay pride parade. And the shit they did to build up and then tear down red tribe's electoral chances could easily just be applied to blue tribe this time around. [0] After four years of deliberately exempting him from their own moderation rules, of course [1] Narcissistic personality disorder
sublinear 2y ago
“Balaji is a friend of mine and is neither a dumbshit nor a clown,” tweeted economics blogger Noah Smith last June, defending Balaji from critics.
- tootie 2y ago
  I think there's a lack of appropriate adjectives for people like Balaji and also Musk or even Marc Andreesen. It's plainly obvious that none of them are actually dumb. These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations. Where they fall down is in being prone to being wildly irrational. They're also just self-absorbed and seemingly lacking in empathy and compassion.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    It's a different form of rationality, one that is self-referential. They understand the Internet as a medium for discourse, where the audience is extremely large but the number of other memes competing for attention is also very large. They also understand that the more outrageous and anger-provoking a statement is, the more likely it is to go viral. Therefore, the way to ensure that your statements actually have an impact is to hype them up to the most provocative, outrageous form that you can, see who bites, piss people off, and get them talking. We're discussing this article, after all, right? We know who Balaji is. While look at how many very rational "Show HN" posts here fail to get traction or reach the front page. Oftentimes, there's a kernel of a true idea behind the hype, but it's been taken to the most extreme form possible simply because the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      > the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral. Thus social media drives society insane.
      - pixl97 2y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc This video will make you angry is correct yet again.
delichon 2y ago
A creative mind that follows many trails spends time in very odd places. I too have some, uh, highly idiosyncratic notions, but that I prefer not to mention. I suspect that people who don't have been following fewer trails. I value these odd characters as scouts that happen to report the occasional bigfoot. If you take them as oracles, yeah they're horrible. If you take them as a source for "anything that good hackers would find interesting", there are pearls in the dross.
- phyzome 2y ago
  There are plenty of other idiosyncratic people out there who aren't, entirely literally, calling for ethnic cleansing.
dist-epoch 2y ago
Balaji is a clown, a few years ago he was calling bitcoin a battery, because you can sell it and buy electricity with the money you got. By this logic everything is a battery, a $100 bill is a battery, ...
- khuey 2y ago
  He lost one million dollars in an insane bet he made with a guy on Twitter about hyperinflation.
LightBug1 2y ago
Concerning considering the amount of tech douche's who worship at the feet of 'Balaji'.
- leosanchez 2y ago
  Ironic since Balaji is name of a god in India
  - seattle_spring 2y ago
    Maybe Balaji and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh would be in good company.
karaterobot 2y ago
If I had any illusions that big tech could run the world better than anybody else, I'd be more sympathetic to this position. I'd love to see a tech company try to function in a world where they can't just lay people off, or pivot in another direction, or sell off assets. In the real world, governments need stability, continuity, and at least some level of concern for people rather than OKRs. Tech companies are successful at making money—some of them, some of the time—but there is absolutely no evidence that they'd be good at doing anything else. They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates.
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates. What's ridiculous is that you can look at governments today, at any level, and imagine them being run worse.
  - spencerflem 2y ago
    It's incredibly easy, we have examples of dictatorships and fascism in living memory.
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      I’m going to guess that people that look at democracy and denounce it as the worst possible system have either not heard of fascism, or have heard of it and think that they would do well being ruled by literally anyone that happens to run the system that imposes it
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    It's really easy for me to imagine my government being run worse than it is today. But anyway, it's a fallacy to think that just because something is bad, replacing it with just anything at all would be an improvement. The thing you replace government with would have to be better suited to it, which there is just no basis for saying Silicon Valley is. In fact, there's enough evidence that SV is bad at governing their own very very small kingdoms, even with the benefit of an existing infrastructure and rule of law, established by others, in place. Man, it's weird for me to be in the position of defending government. I'm not that guy. But tech leadership is just laughably unsuited to replacing them.
stop50 2y ago
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
azinman2 2y ago
Why is this article flagged? It seems very appropriate to be here.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Most politics is off-topic for HN. Also, it typically leads to shouting matches, which are terrible discussions. It's not what HN aims for, and so political articles usually get flagged. Arguably, this one is more on-topic than most politics. Also arguably, the discussion hasn't degenerated (yet). So, maybe flagged just because of politics, rather than because the discussion is awful. By the way, flagging is done by users, not by the moderators. So it's us, not YC, that thinks this is problematic (or likely to become so).
  - LarryDarrell 2y ago
    From the article: >"described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” “The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” I think this article is the most on-topic there could be. The users here that want Tech News and Tech News only are doing themselves, and the community a disservice.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - jaysonelliot 2y ago
    I fear the flagging is most likely by people who sympathize with Balaji's worldview, and don't like reading the comments criticizing it.
  - consumer451 2y ago
    Are not posts where there is a potential conflict of interest explicitly called out as something that HN works to not censor? User flags can be overridden by moderators. There are some very notable examples, usually I have been very impressed by this. So far, this is not one of those cases.
archagon 2y ago
This is the problem with living in a democracy while working for a feudal corporation. You might get it in your head that a feudal political structure is somehow more efficient, rewarding, or just, and bring this with you to the voting booth. We desperately need more democracy in the workplace.
archagon 2y ago
Writing something like this should be socially equivalent to soiling yourself in public, and yet a number of higher-ups in the SV/VC space (plus plenty or regular techies) seem to support this guy. It is truly disturbing.
seattle_spring 2y ago
> The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter. This is such a wonderful, perfect metaphor for who Balaji is and the merit of his ideas. Please leave SF alone. It’s a city with a ton of problems, but it’d be a whole lot worse as whatever, um, this is. I honestly genuinely hate that I have to push back against non-tech folks hating on tech people and assuming we’re all like Balaji and Musk. However, the amount of people who support them makes me take a step back and realize that I really might not fit in with the tech community at all. Stuff like this disgusts me.
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
This is very obviously a joke.
- phyzome 2y ago
  There's no indication of satire here.
coldtrait 2y ago
I've genuinely never understood a single thing he's talked about ever. I remember he was on Sam Harris' podcast talking about his ideas and none of it made sense to me at all. I don't think I'll get a response, but I'll try anyway. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
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consumer451 2y ago
Balaji (2021): > Btw, I rarely post personal news on here, but I moved to Asia awhile back and will be splitting time between India and Singapore . > Why? They are optimistic on technology, they’ve brought hundreds of millions of people online, and they both speak தமிழ் & have great dosas! https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1355088787286544384 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1355088787286544384 --- Meta Edit: I would just like to add that this one of the most vibrant recent discussions, with many 5 digit karma posters, and this is not a flame war. This seems to happen a lot in the last couple years. Some of the most interesting discussions now appear to happen, post-flag. What does this mean for HN?
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

139 points by jaysonelliot 2y ago

I didn't know Garry Tan, the current Y Combinator CEO, was such a nut job... The quotes cited are straight up fascism...

consumer451 2y ago
As I love this website, and the societal benefit which real YC disruption has accomplished, so very much, I wish that I could disagree with you. I must be misunderstanding something. Please someone explain this to me.

koolba 2y ago

> Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”). So a reverse CHAZ?

throwaway48476 2y ago
It's either this or face another Nika riot of 532.

intellectronica 2y ago

I haven't been to SF since many years. Is it really that bad? Moving around, especially for rich tech people, especially within the US and the developed world in general, is really easy. If SF is really such a catastrophe, why are so many still there? To me it sounds a bit like some of the tech bros want to get into politics as a hobby and they picked this issue because it's especially salient to them. From far away it looks ... bizarre.

alephnerd 2y ago
> it sounds a bit like some of the tech bros want to get into politics as a hobby and they picked this issue because it's especially salient to them It's pretty much this. SF has issues, but a lot of that is visible only because the Financial District directly neighbors the poorest part of the city (Tenderloin, 6th street, civic center)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 2y ago
  Yeah. I’ve been there less recently than I used to go. Maybe the last time I was at the Moscone for an event I was sort of steeling myself for the zombie apocalypse. And yeah it’s not great around there and Union Square. I usually stay towards the Ferry Building to avoid the worst. But it’s not IMO much worse than it’s been for years and years.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Yep. I think most recent Bay Area transplants got used to how clean and shiny SF was in the 2010-17 period, which was inherently an anomaly in SF's history. It's always had a transient issue, and the high availability of support resource, the conversions of RSOs into hotels and airbnbs made visible, and the increased gentrification of SF (upper middle class white collar families didn't live in Mission, much of the SoMA-Potrero flatlands, much of Castro, etc until the 2010s) made these extremely visible. Now that hybrid work has been normalized, I expect to see housing in the inner city (Tenderloin, Union Square) portion of SF to become significantly affordable, as those boutique hotels are returning to their RSO roots. And it already has based on the lack of rent increases with my former landlord's management company (all the 1-2 bdrms their renting out have stabilized in the $1500-2000/mo range in the inner city areas) The city still has a lot of value in the tech ecosystem, but there's a reason the tech industry is called "Silicon Valley", not San Francisco. The gravity has always been in Santa Clara County, and always will be, but now San Francisco County has a decent bigtech scene as well (which didn't really exist there before the 2000s).

consumer451 2y ago

This is so insane that it’s hard to believe.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I had to check if it was April 1. Any of the creators of the "Silicon Valley" TV show want a pitch for a new season?
photonthug 2y ago
Impressive, this is some of the most absolutely batshit crazy ranting I have seen in quite a while, and one of my hobbies is talking to crazy people. I assume “grays” is riffing on the alleged alien type, and truly the whole master plan is like a caricature of a conspiracy theory. Yes fellow humans, you enjoy your so called “banquets” do you not? Prepare to submit to my rule!
- spencerflem 2y ago
  Greys is a reference to Slate Star Codex: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... Originally described in 2014 as: "typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins- style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time" But since then the tech world went off the deep end into anti-wokeness and the left has (rightfully imo) come to resent tech and tech companies so they've moved to be on the side of the "red tribe"
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    The funny thing is, the red tribe hates them anyway. Trump isn't a tech guy, he's a politically untreatable NPD[1] case, and he only values sycophants that will stay consistently loyal to him. Big Tech banning Trump off social media[0] means that, whether they wanted to or not, they took the blue tribe's side. And of course, blue tribe hates them, too. Grey tribe's social progressiveness is mostly an accident. They're perfectly fine selling weapons to war criminals just as much as they're fine selling lattes at a gay pride parade. And the shit they did to build up and then tear down red tribe's electoral chances could easily just be applied to blue tribe this time around. [0] After four years of deliberately exempting him from their own moderation rules, of course [1] Narcissistic personality disorder

sublinear 2y ago

“Balaji is a friend of mine and is neither a dumbshit nor a clown,” tweeted economics blogger Noah Smith last June, defending Balaji from critics.

tootie 2y ago
I think there's a lack of appropriate adjectives for people like Balaji and also Musk or even Marc Andreesen. It's plainly obvious that none of them are actually dumb. These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations. Where they fall down is in being prone to being wildly irrational. They're also just self-absorbed and seemingly lacking in empathy and compassion.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It's a different form of rationality, one that is self-referential. They understand the Internet as a medium for discourse, where the audience is extremely large but the number of other memes competing for attention is also very large. They also understand that the more outrageous and anger-provoking a statement is, the more likely it is to go viral. Therefore, the way to ensure that your statements actually have an impact is to hype them up to the most provocative, outrageous form that you can, see who bites, piss people off, and get them talking. We're discussing this article, after all, right? We know who Balaji is. While look at how many very rational "Show HN" posts here fail to get traction or reach the front page. Oftentimes, there's a kernel of a true idea behind the hype, but it's been taken to the most extreme form possible simply because the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    > the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral. Thus social media drives society insane.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc This video will make you angry is correct yet again.

delichon 2y ago

A creative mind that follows many trails spends time in very odd places. I too have some, uh, highly idiosyncratic notions, but that I prefer not to mention. I suspect that people who don't have been following fewer trails. I value these odd characters as scouts that happen to report the occasional bigfoot. If you take them as oracles, yeah they're horrible. If you take them as a source for "anything that good hackers would find interesting", there are pearls in the dross.

phyzome 2y ago
There are plenty of other idiosyncratic people out there who aren't, entirely literally, calling for ethnic cleansing.

dist-epoch 2y ago

Balaji is a clown, a few years ago he was calling bitcoin a battery, because you can sell it and buy electricity with the money you got. By this logic everything is a battery, a $100 bill is a battery, ...

khuey 2y ago
He lost one million dollars in an insane bet he made with a guy on Twitter about hyperinflation.

LightBug1 2y ago

Concerning considering the amount of tech douche's who worship at the feet of 'Balaji'.

leosanchez 2y ago
Ironic since Balaji is name of a god in India
- seattle_spring 2y ago
  Maybe Balaji and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh would be in good company.

karaterobot 2y ago

If I had any illusions that big tech could run the world better than anybody else, I'd be more sympathetic to this position. I'd love to see a tech company try to function in a world where they can't just lay people off, or pivot in another direction, or sell off assets. In the real world, governments need stability, continuity, and at least some level of concern for people rather than OKRs. Tech companies are successful at making money—some of them, some of the time—but there is absolutely no evidence that they'd be good at doing anything else. They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates.

itsoktocry 2y ago
>They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates. What's ridiculous is that you can look at governments today, at any level, and imagine them being run worse.
- spencerflem 2y ago
  It's incredibly easy, we have examples of dictatorships and fascism in living memory.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    I’m going to guess that people that look at democracy and denounce it as the worst possible system have either not heard of fascism, or have heard of it and think that they would do well being ruled by literally anyone that happens to run the system that imposes it
- karaterobot 2y ago
  It's really easy for me to imagine my government being run worse than it is today. But anyway, it's a fallacy to think that just because something is bad, replacing it with just anything at all would be an improvement. The thing you replace government with would have to be better suited to it, which there is just no basis for saying Silicon Valley is. In fact, there's enough evidence that SV is bad at governing their own very very small kingdoms, even with the benefit of an existing infrastructure and rule of law, established by others, in place. Man, it's weird for me to be in the position of defending government. I'm not that guy. But tech leadership is just laughably unsuited to replacing them.

stop50 2y ago

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

azinman2 2y ago

Why is this article flagged? It seems very appropriate to be here.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Most politics is off-topic for HN. Also, it typically leads to shouting matches, which are terrible discussions. It's not what HN aims for, and so political articles usually get flagged. Arguably, this one is more on-topic than most politics. Also arguably, the discussion hasn't degenerated (yet). So, maybe flagged just because of politics, rather than because the discussion is awful. By the way, flagging is done by users, not by the moderators. So it's us, not YC, that thinks this is problematic (or likely to become so).
- LarryDarrell 2y ago
  From the article: >"described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” “The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” I think this article is the most on-topic there could be. The users here that want Tech News and Tech News only are doing themselves, and the community a disservice.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- jaysonelliot 2y ago
  I fear the flagging is most likely by people who sympathize with Balaji's worldview, and don't like reading the comments criticizing it.
- consumer451 2y ago
  Are not posts where there is a potential conflict of interest explicitly called out as something that HN works to not censor? User flags can be overridden by moderators. There are some very notable examples, usually I have been very impressed by this. So far, this is not one of those cases.

archagon 2y ago

This is the problem with living in a democracy while working for a feudal corporation. You might get it in your head that a feudal political structure is somehow more efficient, rewarding, or just, and bring this with you to the voting booth. We desperately need more democracy in the workplace.

archagon 2y ago

Writing something like this should be socially equivalent to soiling yourself in public, and yet a number of higher-ups in the SV/VC space (plus plenty or regular techies) seem to support this guy. It is truly disturbing.

seattle_spring 2y ago

> The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter. This is such a wonderful, perfect metaphor for who Balaji is and the merit of his ideas. Please leave SF alone. It’s a city with a ton of problems, but it’d be a whole lot worse as whatever, um, this is. I honestly genuinely hate that I have to push back against non-tech folks hating on tech people and assuming we’re all like Balaji and Musk. However, the amount of people who support them makes me take a step back and realize that I really might not fit in with the tech community at all. Stuff like this disgusts me.

deepfriedchokes 2y ago

This is very obviously a joke.

phyzome 2y ago
There's no indication of satire here.

coldtrait 2y ago

I've genuinely never understood a single thing he's talked about ever. I remember he was on Sam Harris' podcast talking about his ideas and none of it made sense to me at all. I don't think I'll get a response, but I'll try anyway. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

deleted 2y ago
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consumer451 2y ago

Balaji (2021): > Btw, I rarely post personal news on here, but I moved to Asia awhile back and will be splitting time between India and Singapore . > Why? They are optimistic on technology, they’ve brought hundreds of millions of people online, and they both speak தமிழ் & have great dosas! https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1355088787286544384 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1355088787286544384 --- Meta Edit: I would just like to add that this one of the most vibrant recent discussions, with many 5 digit karma posters, and this is not a flame war. This seems to happen a lot in the last couple years. Some of the most interesting discussions now appear to happen, post-flag. What does this mean for HN?

deleted 2y ago

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