3 ms·

Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit. "This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not." pg once linked to a

by palish 18y ago

Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit. "This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not." pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important." And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hype turned out not to be even remotely important, and so yes, maybe Israel is using phosphorous, or maybe the whole thing is staged to make Israel look bad, or maybe....! My point is, you can't know the whole truth, so please post this to some other community that values importance over intelligence!

tlrobinson 18y ago
Slightly OT, but I'm curious about the criteria for making submissions "dead". This one was briefly dead, but reappeared after a few minutes. Can posts be made "undead" by additional up votes, or was it explicitly brought back by a moderator?
- ivankirigin 18y ago
  An editor killed it, then an editor unkilled it.
- palish 18y ago
  The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced. This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are: - You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship. - After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated. - No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal. Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet? On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.
  - pg 18y ago
    Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.
    - palish 18y ago
      Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior. But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
      - pg 18y ago
        There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
        olefoo 18y ago
        If you're providing a messaging system analogous to email you should be covered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.
  - deleted 18y ago
- pg 18y ago
  Are you sure it was dead? I just looked in the kill log, and there is no record of an editor killing it. The kill log is only kept per server invocation, but the server process has been running since yesterday evening, PST.
  - tlrobinson 18y ago
    I was pretty sure it was, but I could have been mistaken. Is there a difference between "dead" and whatever happens when enough users flag a submission? If so, it could have been the latter.
    - pg 18y ago
      No, that would end up in the kill log too.
pg 18y ago
I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about it here too. As for the claim that this should be killed because it's a crap link, it definitely seems over the threshold for that. It's not just a bunch of random, biased bystanders who are making this accusation, but the UN (http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html). So it is at least something that has to be taken seriously.
- palish 18y ago
  Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.
  - davi 18y ago
    "... and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza." I care a lot about certain political issues but I would not try to talk about them on HN, and I bet you wouldn't either. It seems weird -- almost sycophantic -- to so readily apply a different standard to Paul Graham. The only way I think one can attempt to justify a different standard for him is by invoking the American (only?) expression, 'his house, his rules'. In this way of thinking, he built the site, and we are his guests. But even this seems like a pretty attenuated rationale, to me.
    - palish 18y ago
      Yeah, there's an element of 'his house, his rules'. But mostly it's just too taxing to continue caring. If he wants one high-quality political article on the site, fine, it doesn't really matter. The site didn't explode as a result. And there are a lot of interesting things to do besides trying to win a debate. Right now, you could be conversing with someone through a Mac Mini: http://coworkthailand.com/say/ http://coworkthailand.com/say/ I'm also tired of coming off sounding like a negative person. "you support a political submission!" "stop group-downvoting this guy for his opinion!" "we can't click through a killed submission!" "you disabled someone's account for possibly dubious reasons!" -- these are not my issues, and it's hard to feel like any of them actually matter in the big picture, and if they don't matter, why care? And it feels against my character to speak like that anyway. So I've decided to find out where the site will steer us rather than wrestling to steer the site.
noor420 18y ago
Speaking of Israel, here is a video you folks may find interesting: "Who controls the USA? Bush or Israel" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGroeDe4VYM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGroeDe4VYM (posted earlier) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436905

by palish 18y ago

tlrobinson 18y ago

Slightly OT, but I'm curious about the criteria for making submissions "dead". This one was briefly dead, but reappeared after a few minutes. Can posts be made "undead" by additional up votes, or was it explicitly brought back by a moderator?

ivankirigin 18y ago
An editor killed it, then an editor unkilled it.
palish 18y ago
The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced. This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are: - You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship. - After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated. - No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal. Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet? On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.
- pg 18y ago
  Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.
  - palish 18y ago
    Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior. But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
    - pg 18y ago
      There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
      - olefoo 18y ago
        If you're providing a messaging system analogous to email you should be covered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.
- deleted 18y ago
pg 18y ago
Are you sure it was dead? I just looked in the kill log, and there is no record of an editor killing it. The kill log is only kept per server invocation, but the server process has been running since yesterday evening, PST.
- tlrobinson 18y ago
  I was pretty sure it was, but I could have been mistaken. Is there a difference between "dead" and whatever happens when enough users flag a submission? If so, it could have been the latter.
  - pg 18y ago
    No, that would end up in the kill log too.

pg 18y ago

I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about it here too. As for the claim that this should be killed because it's a crap link, it definitely seems over the threshold for that. It's not just a bunch of random, biased bystanders who are making this accusation, but the UN (http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html). So it is at least something that has to be taken seriously.

palish 18y ago
Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.
- davi 18y ago
  "... and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza." I care a lot about certain political issues but I would not try to talk about them on HN, and I bet you wouldn't either. It seems weird -- almost sycophantic -- to so readily apply a different standard to Paul Graham. The only way I think one can attempt to justify a different standard for him is by invoking the American (only?) expression, 'his house, his rules'. In this way of thinking, he built the site, and we are his guests. But even this seems like a pretty attenuated rationale, to me.
  - palish 18y ago
    Yeah, there's an element of 'his house, his rules'. But mostly it's just too taxing to continue caring. If he wants one high-quality political article on the site, fine, it doesn't really matter. The site didn't explode as a result. And there are a lot of interesting things to do besides trying to win a debate. Right now, you could be conversing with someone through a Mac Mini: http://coworkthailand.com/say/ http://coworkthailand.com/say/ I'm also tired of coming off sounding like a negative person. "you support a political submission!" "stop group-downvoting this guy for his opinion!" "we can't click through a killed submission!" "you disabled someone's account for possibly dubious reasons!" -- these are not my issues, and it's hard to feel like any of them actually matter in the big picture, and if they don't matter, why care? And it feels against my character to speak like that anyway. So I've decided to find out where the site will steer us rather than wrestling to steer the site.

noor420 18y ago

Speaking of Israel, here is a video you folks may find interesting: "Who controls the USA? Bush or Israel" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGroeDe4VYM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGroeDe4VYM (posted earlier) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436905