I like significant LLM news and even well-justified opinions.
I don’t like seeing essentially the same LLM opinion and justification again and again. This happens with both pro-AI and anti-AI opinions. And some of the justifications (on both sides) are poor. For example, I don’t want to read “LLMs have improved my productivity so much!” without evidence; show me a mostly AI-generated program and code, and explain the (AI-augmented) development process. On the other side, I’ve seen the “LLM inevitablism” argument multiple times, and…I don’t agree with really any of it. It ignores that LLMs are useful (to some extent), so they’ll probably be part of the future no matter what an average reader does; and if LLMs aren’t useful enough to replace everyone and everything (currently they aren’t), they won’t be all of the future, which even the people claiming inevitability are saying (and those who do claim that future LLMs will do everything, you can point to current LLMs and the CEOs of AI companies who, even in their position, are lowering expectations).
I guess that if I could I adapt to cleartype when I ditched my 16" VGA Philips CRT, I'll be ready for "AI-powered Immersive Experiences", whatever that means in Visual Studio Code.
Should have made it more clear. These are keyword exclusion filters and the link I provided was to hide llm-related stuff. You're free to add more keywords to the filter.
This actually looks really cool! Especially the dark mode and the feature of showing the comments reply to which actually is something that I wanted as well!
Honestly this is how Hackernews should look haha!
It does take some time in firefox/zen tho in the start so its not really instant (especially the bars which are shown next to the comment to indicate who they are responding to)
For some reason also, Hackernews stopped working when I installed this extension, my wifi may have glitched and I reconnected to wifi so its working now.
We've been doing Bayesian content (aka spam) filtering for over 20 years, based in no small part on Paul Graham's essay "A plan for spam". According to HP [1], a home computer at the time had a single 1.5Ghz core and 256Mb of RAM.
Using LLMs would achieve essentially the same while requiring a couple orders of magnitude more resources.
Would those filters be keyword-based only? One benefit of an LLM-based filter I can imagine is that it has a much better understanding of the meaning of text.
I'm tired of the hype too. Yes, coding agents are useful but the bubble seems primed to pop. Agents are not profitable enough to justify the billions of investments in data centers and chips.
I have a buddy who was a young entrepeneur, during the Dot-Com era. He renamed his company to Company Name Dot Com. A few months later the bubble burst, and those last two words were a smelly fart to potential investors.
He was forced to a buy-out, kept as a VP, intentionally forced out, and accepted cash to settle their violation of terms.
My hackles rose when he made the name change, but... not my business. Sad to see how quickly my intuition was validated. Would his company have survived else? Dunno, of course. But hopping onto the fad wave was, in retrospect, far more dangerous than simply navigating with the assets he had.
I started coming here in the early 2010s, and honestly I like its mix now better than the late 2010s, when SaaS was stagnating and every new company was Uber/AirBnB for X and people were trying to hype crypto constantly. It's still worse than the early years though.
Less party partisan stuff being sneaked in then (I think it's the parties themselves sometimes doing it now), but more meaningful discussions on politics, especially/primarily having to do with how they crossed with tech.
But everything crosses over with tech: finance, the current state of the market, importing and exporting, taxes, surveillance, censorship, encryption, copyright, patents, freedom to tinker, wars, weapons, government contracting, military contracting, corporate structure, etc. etc.
There wasn't this random immigration outrage bait pointing out 1 of the 80 people in a particular month who were shot by law enforcement for no good reason, but there was plenty about immigration because techies are immigrants and hire immigrants, and outsourcing, and working with a remote team in the middle of the night, etc. etc.
The only thing that was absolutely deemed "politics" and excluded eventually was discussions of women and black people in tech.
AI is just the new Rust, is the new X in javascript, is the new concurrency/Erlang, and so on. All of those things are still important; none of them went away or are going away.
I think heavy moderation serves to keep some variety, and to simply throw away the 9000th iteration of the same thread that never goes anywhere. AI stories aren't bad; it's the same AI stories, again, that are bad.
We live in a society, the government provides (or provides permission for) roads, utilities, housing and a boatload of other rules & regulation to protect people.
Virtually any discussion around anything will always lead back to politics because it is the central body that allows us to live the lives we want, this is why voting is important!
It's like returning the shopping cart at the grocery store. Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
The action may not matter, you are free to choose, but not doing it does make you a bad citizen. Personal importance doesn't factor into it, this is an external designation.
I’m guilty of some political debates here no doubt but man it seems like there have been a lot new accounts lately coming in red hot and starting fights
Looks like a majority of it’s all politics and LLMs. I think we’re all as a collective tired of both and want something ‘interesting’ for once to post.
I get that. And if an LLM story disappears from the front page—oh well.
I'll defend the political stories though. For me, all the other places out there that vend politics are truly awful. While a political post lingers briefly on the HN front page, I find I actually learn something from the comments. If there are shit-posts in the discussion, they are quickly "dead". More often though there are (seemingly) reasoned debates about the issues in the comments.
I appreciate (what I am embarrassed to call) a more intellectual discussion on politics than I have been able to find anywhere else. (Embarrassed because I'm walking a fine line trying not to appear to cast the discussions as "elitist". Or maybe I am an elitist, who knows.)
It’s not that the quality of politics posts here are very high (you get plenty of “engineers outside their domain” type stuff). Just, it is hard to find sites with
* Active political discussion communities
* That haven’t swung dramatically to some extreme and eventually worn down the local “opposition” party
I’ve got boards I go to for politics but the ratio is so lopsided, and the one or two remaining posters that disagree with the consensus seem to be more or less sticking around out of contrarianism (which unfortunately decreases the quality of their posts).
I think if HN let too many political threads stick around, that would destroy the whatever quality the discussion has.
I always agree with a good-faith, well-reasoned political argument. And HN generally seems to have a much more educated base than most of the other stuff out there--but agreed with the other person that I think it's probably best to keep that content off of HN, unfortunately.
> That used to be possible with a carefully curated Twitter feed, then a series of bad decisions made that impossible
But you wouldn't know from reading HN that X, the tech company, has become a shitshow, as all discussions about this are "political" and flagged by users.
I feel the same way. I crave high quality political discussion about what's going on in the US and this is one of the few places I can get it. Most places just offer memes and hot takes.
Its a tired trope, but you are wrong. The haves and the have nots define everything about our society and Not Addressing The Situation is a very active choice, thus politics.
Hand-waving everything as "politics" is not healthy. It's necessary for us to be able to make collective decisions on societal questions which is what "politics" are.
This is what the biggest names in the VC class want you to think as they continue to enrich themselves, while (in the USA at least) they support a regime that is growing in its authoritarian output.
Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
> Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
These guys all benefit when the No-Politics Purity Brigade drives by and flag-kills every article pointing out their wrongdoing as "political." By flagging this stuff, they're actually making HN more political: They are defending billionaires, their agendas, and their status-quo politics.
So I, as a software engineer, have to deal with the impacts of this administration both making my employment harder as well as terrorizing the city I live in. Where do you suggest I would go to share these issues other than the site that is specifically for hackers and tech workers?
I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
It’s tiring for me because it seems like everyone is just spitting mad about AI, and at every opportunity they breathlessly make sure to let us all know how useless AI is, and how they are indeed the one true programmer who has no need for such base and depraved additions to their workflow. There they are, standing (or maybe hunching over?) bold and proud, on the shores of Algorithmia where no LLM could despoil that one true paragon of software engineering, as if the Platonic forms themselves deigned to come out of the realm of legend merely to demonstrate to us mortals how software ought truly be written.
Anyway, I think AI is pretty neat and use it every day.
The opposite is true for many of us. Having used various models, tools, agent orchestration etc.. All of these sensationalist posts of 'When I use Model X with Tooling Y I can build the world!' just don't resonate and it becomes draining to constantly have all this pushed through my eyeballs and having to filter it out.
LLMs have their uses but it isn't as great as everyone makes out to be nor is it as bad as others make out it is. Every week its X model has new SWE bench and is the best in class frontier blah blah - yet its actually just much the same as the week before. Quarter to quarter you could argue there is more of a diff between capabilities and performance but the LLM news cycle is much shorter than that.
Yea, I see these people on HN all the time. How they've written 45 billion lines of code without ever making a mistake and they put their life and dedication into being the best programmer that never sleeps and is available 24/7, and I'm like "How come I only see you people online and never see you working in the field".
Now, don't get me totally wrong, there's probably a few people out there like that, but trying to use 1%ers, or .1%ers as an example for anything is rather useless as supply and demand would make them a mythical creature with mythical pay. More often than I like I end up thinking ""I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question," after asking about the latest feature and the spaghetti .
Feels the opposite for some of us. Lots of angry takes about people critiquing it, endless praise of how Claude code makes folks 1000x more productive, etc.
It’s probably somewhere in the middle with both of us noticing the examples we find annoying more often than we notice the ones we agree with.
Hacker News has a silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news. I hope it stays that way. I'm just completely tired of those political echo chamber articles, even when I happen to agree with them.
What if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers.
Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.
We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
A near-total ban on the whole thing is easier to implement and enforce than trying to make online discussions of politics not suck, when their natural state seems to be to suck big time.
Is it impossible to maintain a civilized discussion of hot topic political issues? No. But it's not a solved problem, or anywhere near. I respect the "keep the incendiary stuff off the front page" policy.
"No Politics on the front page" is itself a highly politically charged policy: One that favors the status quo and favors hiding wrongdoing. I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
I wish HN users who want HN to be about politics would be honest about simply wanting HN to be a political echo chamber of their preferred flavor, instead of hiding behind the flimsy excuses like "everything is political actually".
I don’t think people actually want yet another echo chamber. Anyone who has been exercising even a modicum of critical thinking sees where echo chambers lead.
I think a forum where bad faith polarizers are downvoted and good faith open minded discussion is rewarded would go a long ways.
It seems to me you think of politics as being the politics of the sensationalist 24 hour news cycle. Sure, that is a mind killer.
But I encourage you to take a look at politics as a broader thing. Read some academic, foundational political philosophy works. Politics in its broad sense is inescapable. Better to know it and be an active participant than to leave it up to others.
You start by allowing "politics as a broader thing", flash forward a year, then you notice that at any given time, at least 20% of the frontpage is occupied by people screeching their throats raw with some incendiary hyper-partisan rhetoric.
The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.
A 'near-total ban' would involve basically banning the entire site of HN, and also tends to expose the inherent hypocrisy in any platform attempting to be 'non-political'.
For example, HN had massive threads years ago dedicated to glazing everything Elon Musk did. Now, conveniently, any discussion of Elon Musk, Grok etc is now flagged and considered political as the winds have changed to be largely negative. Same goes for a lot of stuff people took for granted in tech, because now that stuff was made part of the system that makes our lives worse.
Tech and finance have wedded to each other and finance has lobbied for politics so hard.
So I don't think that tech and politics can be seperated from each other and this shows why.
Earlier, I don't think that appreciating Elon Musk was considered political for the most part (well I read his biography and I thought he was just interesting guy) but his recent acts on twitter (I refuse to call it X) etc. just show how bubbly even I or people who read his biography were.
After some new reports on him, I feel much more in disdain of man than not. My cousin still glazes Elon tho.
I feel like there is some dunning kruger effect at play here. I read his biography -> I feel smart -> I say Elon's smart previously on HN -> elon acts dumb as mouse with ketamine fueled addiction -> but I supported Elon earlier -> most people don't want internal contradictions so they will try to justify it -> Gets into glazing elon -> Flags people who give genuine criticism of the guy now -> gets to the far alt right
I feel like the problem is more so the extremism.
There are some real issues happening in the world and news is covering it but some hackernews users definitely flag anything that they find not fitting in their world order.
I just want to say that its okay to have internal contradiction because we are all human and we can evaluate people wrongly. Doesn't mean we have to stick with that.
I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in middle school (it was in a pendrive connected to TV so whenever satellite connection got lost, I used to watch it), I even went ahead in school and gave a speech on steve jobs, next and everything so much so that the teacher (he was a teacher for such extra activities started calling me steve jobs)
Anyways, my point is that it was only later in life where I realized that althoguh steve jobs was a good businessman, how valuable steve wozniak and other underrated people are and how ethically questionable xerox's decision was and his personal life too...
I just want to say that there is a nuance about steve jobs as well, he was pretty rude to his employees.
Like I feel like there is just nuance to the whole situation that people forget in HN
It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.
I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.
PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
Usually mentioning anything about doing proper epidemiology (e.g. analysing COVID numbers), or anything modern about atmosphere physics and climate-modelling gets taken down everywhere within 24 hours - by humans.
Mathematics and physics is something a lot of people don't like and really love to take down. Idiots censoring experts is a real problem. This place here has less idiots, but outnumbering experts with stupidity is something that works everywhere.
A random sampling of humans might be better. The problem with people that want to take things down and cause problems is they are not random. Brigaders, marketing agencies with an agenda, nation state propaganda teams, groups with religious motivations, idiots that have been propagandized to and think they are fighting the good war, all of these tip the scales away from user voting being useful on forums.
(I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.)
In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
> In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
This still does a huge disservice to how the degradation can happen in discussions when now Everything is becoming more political so much so that one side of the party needs to flag what the other party says and this division is running deep creating a large seperation.
Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand.
Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.
Yes, the moderators are in effect editors of a news media site with heavy social elements. Editorial decisions about articles should be handled differently from content moderation of user comments. There is a lot of editorial involvement (tweaking titles, hand placing articles on the front page, flag removal) but almost no transparency or communication. Sometimes a pinned comment from dang but that's it.
These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.
"An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology" seems to be uncontentious in itself but that it is on economicsfromthetopdown.com raises a question about why it is there at all. Also there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.
I’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it.
There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.
Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
The biggest example of this is on military stuff. You can literally post northrup grumman placed articles from military trade journals fawning over some new weapon system and that's fine, that's technology. But any comment about the applications of that technology, who it will be used on, by whom, for whose benefit, with what consequences, all of that is off limits. That's political.
I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
I never understood the "flag" option on HN. Usually "flag" means to flag as inappropriate - porn, obvious spam, etc.
But, is it meant to be used as "downvote"? i.e. "I don't want to see this topic" or "I disagree with this opinion?". I guess the equivalent here is just lack of an upvote?
There seems to be a variety feedback that mean different things... e.g. sometimes I would like to say "I strongly disagree with this opinion", but I don't want to say "This shouldn't be on HN".
I mentally think of a comment flag as meaning "The existence of this comment makes the site worse for virtually all users".
There's a difference between a comment like "We'd all be better off they stopped manufacturing external SSDs. A storage device ought to last more than a year" and "SSDs are gay".
The former might interest somebody, while the latter pretty much just wastes space.
That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.
> I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
I so much agree with this being one of the biggest issues in Hackernews in my opinion. (I love hackernews but this has genuine impact where genuine posts can get flagged just because it might be negative but that just feels like very much so censorship in some part) and whenever people mention why flagged? people say the moderation's bad and everything (I admit I must have said this once or twice too when getting angry why posts are getting flagged left and right) & then people mention how moderation's not the fault and its always been this way or similar & we just get really tangential.
The real reason probably seems to be this instead.
We probably need some net negative in case someone intentionally flags something like if they flagged a post (>4 hours) and moderators find that they flagged incorrectly, just have it be visible that they flagged such post.
If there was a genuine mistake, I am sure that moderators will be able to do so but we won't really go around then with people flagging anything or everything that they don't like (some of which might be political news)
I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
Not hard to believe at all. While I don't flag any posts. I have no interest in LLM related content.
I also actively use AI tools btw. It's just tiring seeing everything with AI suffix including monitors.
I don’t like seeing essentially the same LLM opinion and justification again and again. This happens with both pro-AI and anti-AI opinions. And some of the justifications (on both sides) are poor. For example, I don’t want to read “LLMs have improved my productivity so much!” without evidence; show me a mostly AI-generated program and code, and explain the (AI-augmented) development process. On the other side, I’ve seen the “LLM inevitablism” argument multiple times, and…I don’t agree with really any of it. It ignores that LLMs are useful (to some extent), so they’ll probably be part of the future no matter what an average reader does; and if LLMs aren’t useful enough to replace everyone and everything (currently they aren’t), they won’t be all of the future, which even the people claiming inevitability are saying (and those who do claim that future LLMs will do everything, you can point to current LLMs and the CEOs of AI companies who, even in their position, are lowering expectations).
What now ?
My quick google-fu brought me this : https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/smart-monitor/
I guess that if I could I adapt to cleartype when I ditched my 16" VGA Philips CRT, I'll be ready for "AI-powered Immersive Experiences", whatever that means in Visual Studio Code.
Let https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news be your inspiration. Put out the tip jar, I will tip!
(Firefox first class citizen in this regard pls if possible)
Honestly this is how Hackernews should look haha!
It does take some time in firefox/zen tho in the start so its not really instant (especially the bars which are shown next to the comment to indicate who they are responding to)
For some reason also, Hackernews stopped working when I installed this extension, my wifi may have glitched and I reconnected to wifi so its working now.
It's pretty cool fwiw.
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
and/or
https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss
We've been doing Bayesian content (aka spam) filtering for over 20 years, based in no small part on Paul Graham's essay "A plan for spam". According to HP [1], a home computer at the time had a single 1.5Ghz core and 256Mb of RAM.
Using LLMs would achieve essentially the same while requiring a couple orders of magnitude more resources.
[1] https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/specifications-pers...
Reminds me of when everything was e-something. Then i-something. Then net-something. Then my-something. Then cyber-something.
You can tell the age of a tech product by which naming trend it attached to itself.
Related: HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About’
https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8
He was forced to a buy-out, kept as a VP, intentionally forced out, and accepted cash to settle their violation of terms.
My hackles rose when he made the name change, but... not my business. Sad to see how quickly my intuition was validated. Would his company have survived else? Dunno, of course. But hopping onto the fad wave was, in retrospect, far more dangerous than simply navigating with the assets he had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher
Open any thread on these topics lately and you will see the same thing written for the 14,000th time as if it’s novel discussion.
Less party partisan stuff being sneaked in then (I think it's the parties themselves sometimes doing it now), but more meaningful discussions on politics, especially/primarily having to do with how they crossed with tech.
But everything crosses over with tech: finance, the current state of the market, importing and exporting, taxes, surveillance, censorship, encryption, copyright, patents, freedom to tinker, wars, weapons, government contracting, military contracting, corporate structure, etc. etc.
There wasn't this random immigration outrage bait pointing out 1 of the 80 people in a particular month who were shot by law enforcement for no good reason, but there was plenty about immigration because techies are immigrants and hire immigrants, and outsourcing, and working with a remote team in the middle of the night, etc. etc.
The only thing that was absolutely deemed "politics" and excluded eventually was discussions of women and black people in tech.
AI is just the new Rust, is the new X in javascript, is the new concurrency/Erlang, and so on. All of those things are still important; none of them went away or are going away.
I think heavy moderation serves to keep some variety, and to simply throw away the 9000th iteration of the same thread that never goes anywhere. AI stories aren't bad; it's the same AI stories, again, that are bad.
Discussions about open drug use and Bay area housing policy and California highspeed rail are political.
Discussions about Snowden and the NSA are political.
Discussions about the FSF and copyleft are political.
Virtually any discussion around anything will always lead back to politics because it is the central body that allows us to live the lives we want, this is why voting is important!
The action may not matter, you are free to choose, but not doing it does make you a bad citizen. Personal importance doesn't factor into it, this is an external designation.
I'll defend the political stories though. For me, all the other places out there that vend politics are truly awful. While a political post lingers briefly on the HN front page, I find I actually learn something from the comments. If there are shit-posts in the discussion, they are quickly "dead". More often though there are (seemingly) reasoned debates about the issues in the comments.
I appreciate (what I am embarrassed to call) a more intellectual discussion on politics than I have been able to find anywhere else. (Embarrassed because I'm walking a fine line trying not to appear to cast the discussions as "elitist". Or maybe I am an elitist, who knows.)
* Active political discussion communities
* That haven’t swung dramatically to some extreme and eventually worn down the local “opposition” party
I’ve got boards I go to for politics but the ratio is so lopsided, and the one or two remaining posters that disagree with the consensus seem to be more or less sticking around out of contrarianism (which unfortunately decreases the quality of their posts).
I think if HN let too many political threads stick around, that would destroy the whatever quality the discussion has.
It's no longer even the case that reason helps. Wonkery has got run over by mass emotion.
But you wouldn't know from reading HN that X, the tech company, has become a shitshow, as all discussions about this are "political" and flagged by users.
... time passes ...
"What do you mean the people that I didn't vote for are sending me to war to die?!, I'm not political, why am I involved in this" --Modern day Russia.
Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
These guys all benefit when the No-Politics Purity Brigade drives by and flag-kills every article pointing out their wrongdoing as "political." By flagging this stuff, they're actually making HN more political: They are defending billionaires, their agendas, and their status-quo politics.
I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
Open to suggestions from anyone.
Thanks, @dang! keep up the good work.
Anyway, I think AI is pretty neat and use it every day.
LLMs have their uses but it isn't as great as everyone makes out to be nor is it as bad as others make out it is. Every week its X model has new SWE bench and is the best in class frontier blah blah - yet its actually just much the same as the week before. Quarter to quarter you could argue there is more of a diff between capabilities and performance but the LLM news cycle is much shorter than that.
Yea, I see these people on HN all the time. How they've written 45 billion lines of code without ever making a mistake and they put their life and dedication into being the best programmer that never sleeps and is available 24/7, and I'm like "How come I only see you people online and never see you working in the field".
Now, don't get me totally wrong, there's probably a few people out there like that, but trying to use 1%ers, or .1%ers as an example for anything is rather useless as supply and demand would make them a mythical creature with mythical pay. More often than I like I end up thinking ""I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question," after asking about the latest feature and the spaghetti .
It’s probably somewhere in the middle with both of us noticing the examples we find annoying more often than we notice the ones we agree with.
You’ve done a remarkably good job maintaining the quality of the community - we appreciate you.
Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.
We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
A near-total ban on the whole thing is easier to implement and enforce than trying to make online discussions of politics not suck, when their natural state seems to be to suck big time.
Is it impossible to maintain a civilized discussion of hot topic political issues? No. But it's not a solved problem, or anywhere near. I respect the "keep the incendiary stuff off the front page" policy.
I think a forum where bad faith polarizers are downvoted and good faith open minded discussion is rewarded would go a long ways.
But I encourage you to take a look at politics as a broader thing. Read some academic, foundational political philosophy works. Politics in its broad sense is inescapable. Better to know it and be an active participant than to leave it up to others.
The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.
If that failure mode is inevitable in hackernews culture, what does that say about the quality of the technical & business content?
For example, HN had massive threads years ago dedicated to glazing everything Elon Musk did. Now, conveniently, any discussion of Elon Musk, Grok etc is now flagged and considered political as the winds have changed to be largely negative. Same goes for a lot of stuff people took for granted in tech, because now that stuff was made part of the system that makes our lives worse.
So I don't think that tech and politics can be seperated from each other and this shows why.
Earlier, I don't think that appreciating Elon Musk was considered political for the most part (well I read his biography and I thought he was just interesting guy) but his recent acts on twitter (I refuse to call it X) etc. just show how bubbly even I or people who read his biography were.
After some new reports on him, I feel much more in disdain of man than not. My cousin still glazes Elon tho.
I feel like there is some dunning kruger effect at play here. I read his biography -> I feel smart -> I say Elon's smart previously on HN -> elon acts dumb as mouse with ketamine fueled addiction -> but I supported Elon earlier -> most people don't want internal contradictions so they will try to justify it -> Gets into glazing elon -> Flags people who give genuine criticism of the guy now -> gets to the far alt right
I feel like the problem is more so the extremism.
There are some real issues happening in the world and news is covering it but some hackernews users definitely flag anything that they find not fitting in their world order.
I just want to say that its okay to have internal contradiction because we are all human and we can evaluate people wrongly. Doesn't mean we have to stick with that.
I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in middle school (it was in a pendrive connected to TV so whenever satellite connection got lost, I used to watch it), I even went ahead in school and gave a speech on steve jobs, next and everything so much so that the teacher (he was a teacher for such extra activities started calling me steve jobs)
Anyways, my point is that it was only later in life where I realized that althoguh steve jobs was a good businessman, how valuable steve wozniak and other underrated people are and how ethically questionable xerox's decision was and his personal life too...
I just want to say that there is a nuance about steve jobs as well, he was pretty rude to his employees.
Like I feel like there is just nuance to the whole situation that people forget in HN
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513
It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.
I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.
PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
Usually mentioning anything about doing proper epidemiology (e.g. analysing COVID numbers), or anything modern about atmosphere physics and climate-modelling gets taken down everywhere within 24 hours - by humans.
Mathematics and physics is something a lot of people don't like and really love to take down. Idiots censoring experts is a real problem. This place here has less idiots, but outnumbering experts with stupidity is something that works everywhere.
So many important tech related debates lately being silenced by mass flagging. Luckily they remain in https://news.ycombinator.com/active
(I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.)
[0]: https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals/blob/ma... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503199
This still does a huge disservice to how the degradation can happen in discussions when now Everything is becoming more political so much so that one side of the party needs to flag what the other party says and this division is running deep creating a large seperation.
Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand.
Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.
These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.
There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.
I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
But, is it meant to be used as "downvote"? i.e. "I don't want to see this topic" or "I disagree with this opinion?". I guess the equivalent here is just lack of an upvote?
There seems to be a variety feedback that mean different things... e.g. sometimes I would like to say "I strongly disagree with this opinion", but I don't want to say "This shouldn't be on HN".
There's a difference between a comment like "We'd all be better off they stopped manufacturing external SSDs. A storage device ought to last more than a year" and "SSDs are gay".
The former might interest somebody, while the latter pretty much just wastes space.
HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.
I so much agree with this being one of the biggest issues in Hackernews in my opinion. (I love hackernews but this has genuine impact where genuine posts can get flagged just because it might be negative but that just feels like very much so censorship in some part) and whenever people mention why flagged? people say the moderation's bad and everything (I admit I must have said this once or twice too when getting angry why posts are getting flagged left and right) & then people mention how moderation's not the fault and its always been this way or similar & we just get really tangential.
The real reason probably seems to be this instead.
We probably need some net negative in case someone intentionally flags something like if they flagged a post (>4 hours) and moderators find that they flagged incorrectly, just have it be visible that they flagged such post.
If there was a genuine mistake, I am sure that moderators will be able to do so but we won't really go around then with people flagging anything or everything that they don't like (some of which might be political news)
sometime I have the feeling having a username that ends with "xx" does not help much :)