4 ms·
Current % of submissions over last 12 days with "Musk" in title that are flagged
Q. Out of the last 482 submissions (12 days) with "Musk" in title what percentage are flagged?
A. 0.6182572614107884
Method
Using a simple script save all HN pages for past 12 days to single HTML file: "yc.htm".
Then
grep Musk yc.htm -B1|sed '/\[flagged\]/d;/^--/d' > 1.htm
grep Musk yc.htm -B1|sed '/\[flagged\]/!d' >> 1.htm
total=$(links -dump 1.htm|wc -l)
flagged=$(links -dump 1.htm|grep -c \[flagged\])
unflagged=$(links -dump 1.htm|grep -vc \[flagged\])
echo Q. Out of the last $total submissions \(12 days\) with \"Musk\" in title what percentage are flagged?
printf A.\\40
echo $flagged%$total|k
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Kelteseth 2y agoPretty much all nazi salute submissions got flagged.
- rl3 2y agoNot just those; anything "political" has a very high chance of being flagged lately. I was sad to see these flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911535 Respectively: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5279386/hegseth-milley-security-detail https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5279386/hegseth-milley-... https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm The latter is an excellent text and would normally be encouraged under HN guidelines. I just figure the poor mods here don't want to spend their entire waking lives moderating the inevitable flame wars that result, rather than some overt bad faith censorship regime. That or it's users doing it. The discussions have been pretty decent for the political topics that have been let through.
- dang 2y agoThe first of those (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874542) seems to me too topical, i.e. too much about one specific event / specific persons and not enough of intellectual interest. The second (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911535), I agree with you is interesting, and you're right that it would normally be encouraged. The question is whether it's a good submission in this moment. It was obviously submitted in the spirit of ideological battle and I think that is how it would be received by the community; this is probably one of the worst possible times for that particular article to appear. One little-understood weirdness of a site like HN is that an article can be good without being good now. I wrote a long thing about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306, in case anyone is curious. As for how we decide which threads to "let through", I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (including a later reply). If anyone reads those and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. p.s. Thanks for imputing good faith to the mods! Edit: the second article you mentioned did end up getting a big frontpage thread: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 - Feb 2025 (403 comments) pp.s. When there are submissions you think are particularly good, and that particularly should not be flagged, you can always email the link to hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to take a look, and many times we've turned off flags as a result of such an email.
- rl3 2y agoApologies, just saw this days later. I appreciate the in-depth explanations. Glad to see the second article did end up getting traction eventually. >p.s. Thanks for imputing good faith to the mods! My pleasure. Thanks for all your hard work!
- nico 2y agoAnswer: 61.8% I wonder what it is for the last 24hrs It seems like at least all of them have been removed from the front page
- sdwr 2y ago"0.618 percentage" reads as 0.618%, should either be 61.8% or "what fraction? 0.618"
- Ancalagon 2y agoDoes anyone else notice the rampant botting wrt advertising and discussing tesla models on facebook and instagram?
- basementcat 2y agoDoes this take duplicate submissions into account? EDIT: May be interesting to do similar analysis for "paulg"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mdhb 2y agoSeems kind of like a shit system when a tiny fraction of people can control what everyone else sees and they don’t have to provide any sense of justification or even put their names to it. Thats a system ripe for abuse if I’ve ever seen one. HN’s guidelines are woefully out of date for the reality of where things are in 2025 and seems to rely on people just magically acting in good faith all the time.
- dang 2y agoThis is to be expected, because the main thing HN users (and HN mods) seek to avoid is repetition. If there have been 482 submissions in just 12 days (I'll take your word on that), then what's surprising here is that not more than 62% have been flagged. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...