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.
I’m frustrated with how narrow of view people here are taking on politics.
Partisan politics has grown into a nasty oppositional quagmire.
But, Politics in general is defined as “The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.” From a duck duck go search. That is pretty broad.
Open your minds! There is more out there than you think.
This might be heresy, but a CS background doesn't make you an expert on government, governance, or politics. Just as politicians seem woefully uninformed on computer science topics. So a political discussion on Hacker News will naturally lean towards popular conceptions of politics: that is partisanship, slogans, and the other stuff that makes social media politics so toxic. "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation" is not going to enter the picture.
I’m an Elecrical and Computer Engineer (ECE) by schooling. But I did pay attention in my mandatory liberal arts class. I took a Political Philosophy course, and a 400 level History of US Foreign Policy, where I was the only non-history major.
People inevitably opine on government/politics. And because of that I think they should delve deeper. I think that delving deeper and having civil conversation are how we escape the toxic mess media currently dishes out.
1. Very very high verbal skills so that each person can communicate their idea in a way that doesn't leave (much) room for interpretation or a bad-faith reading.
2. A community that "steelmans" each-other's ideas and consistently chooses the best-faith interpretation of what the other person is saying.
(1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities. (2) is generally impossible in a public forum on the internet. Even if everyone on Hacker News stuck to this principle, outsiders would not. You'd get posts on reddit about how "Hacker News is a haven for Nazis". Or posts on X about how "Communists are invading the tech community" and ultimately a lot of bad press for Y Combinator that I'm sure they'd rather not have.
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.
Trying to maintain a civilized discussion about modern politics is like walking a tightrope. You can say "anyone who knows what a tightrope is sees that falling off it would be bad", and it's true, but, does saying that mean that you'll avoid the fall? The failure mode is extremely obvious but not at all easy to avoid.
If you don't have an intuition of "partisan politics are inherently corrosive to human minds", I suggest you get one. It's not impossible to have a civilized discussion of politics, but it is unlikely and unnatural and unstable. It's very, very, very hard to set up and maintain an environment like this in practice.
I won't admit that, because it's not true. You saying that it's true doesn't make it so.
Someone should look at the flagging rates for political threads from 2012, 2018, and today. It would show whether our definition of a "distraction" is based on content quality, or if the appetite for "apoliticism" fluctuates depending on which side of the aisle holds the megaphone.
Has anyone done a sentiment analysis on flagging patterns versus administrative shifts? I suspect the "politics is a mind-killer" argument is a lot more popular when the headlines don't align with the reader's own worldview.
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?
Very little.
I've been told most hackers are humans - not machines or some kind of alien species. So I fully expect hackers to have the flaws people tend to do.
Partisan politics have a nasty habit of capitalizing on human flaws, and bringing out the worst in people who engage deeply in them. Which, in online communities, can have a self-reinforcing effect.
Do some reading about political philosophy and you’ll see how terribly shallow partisan politics is, and how deep the foundations of politics are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosophy
You can say "not all politics are actively toxic to human minds" and point at 18th century philosophical works all day long, but we both know that 18th century philosophical works were never the concern.
I have repeatedly distanced myself from partisan politics in this discussion. I believe I have not made a single statement supporting partisan politics, much less a particular party, in this entire discussion. If you disagree, perhaps you can quote an example.
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
Since the status quo is inherently conservative, that has a stifling effect on innovation - which is inherently liberal. Which is ironic for a site dedicated to disruption. Hence the cognitive dissonance.
I try to entertain opposing viewpoints in all of my comments, even if I don't always agree with them. So while I find it most practical to live conservatively, that doesn't mean that I wish that for the world. It's important to remember that FDR - a liberal - was one of Reagan's heroes. I think that we can imagine a Star Trek style post-scarcity geopolitical reality without abandoning the ethos which got us this far.
Now, regardless of all that, I still think that HN has the best ranking algorithm around. So I would say that if it wants to get serious about getting back to meritocracy, funding real work on hard problems, setting a positive example through intellectual honesty, etc, then it should consider revising its flagging policy.
A proof of concept might be to move flagged posts below the fold past slot 31, rather than removing them completely. Then they could bubble back up on their own merit. Or maybe each flag costs 10 slots, something like that. And all flags should go through human review to prevent gaming, if they don't already.
And just like the other "Silent majority", this is utter tripe.
Every other submission is an ad FFS. Nobody is doing anything to remove ads. HN Itself is an ad.
It's not "Silent", as these people love nothing more than reminding you that topics they don't like are objectively "politics" and "Don't belong on HN" even though HN tried that once and it was terrible
And they aren't "Majority", because the flagging mechanism requires shockingly few flags before a post is knocked off the front page, and if anyone tries to plead any case in the comments, that also knocks it off the page, as a "flamewar", because apparently on a place that insists it is curating thoughtful discussion, high velocity discussion is impossible?
It's a heckler's veto is what it is.
You’ve done a remarkably good job maintaining the quality of the community - we appreciate you.
Maybe Dang got sick of Apple too, because there was a heavy hand on anything anti-Apple at one point.
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).
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
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...
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.
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’
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'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.
Also the site moderators have plainly said that moderating these controversial political threads is a strain on them. You may be enjoying yourself but someone else is paying a hefty price.
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.
... 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.
Thanks, @dang! keep up the good work.
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.
Are you spending your time patrolling /newest and upvoting good submissions, then? There are relatively few people doing this and it's easy to have an outsized impact.
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.
Not voting in America does not increase the burden of other people. My state has voted the same in Presidential elections for two decades. Local politicians almost always run unopposed and I don't think anyone in my lifetime has won here without an endorsement from the party in favor, so they are picked behind closed doors. Our state governor elections can swing, but ultimately one vote is a vanishingly insignificant portion of that.
I vote every year out of habit, but putting the "I VOTED" sticker conspicuously on a trash can probably makes more of a difference than casting my ballot. The two party system is designed to give people an outlet for feeling like they made a difference without any risk of change for the people in power. See how people like Musk and Zuckerberg cozy up with Trump just as easily as Obama.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think just tagging things accordingly would be a lot better than raw censorship. In good old places of Usenet just tagging things as Spam worked quite well. Just filtering out some tags and putting some guys in a kill-file was good enough. But it required manual labour - and eventually that was too much. But with AI now I think tagging could be done efficiently.
If people like to filter out all the tags (sarcasm, math, physics, ...) they can have it - but the way how things work now is that a lot of important information just gets censored by stupid people everywhere. Just hiding information from everybody is quite harmful - being seriously uninformed already killed a lot of people...
I've also always hated binary up/down voting systems. Slashdot had it better with meta moderation where you had a few options to choose from.
I suppose now with AI I could mock up a UI concept I call orange slice voting. Instead of a singular up/down vote, you get what looks like a orange sliced across its equator where each segment has a series of positive and negative vote options and the user gets one selection per post.
"I like this content", "I believe this is true", "Fits this thread", "Good post", and "Misinformation", "I don't like this content", "doesn't fit this thread", "etc"
These can be adjusted for a site as needed and gives more dimensions for people to search and filter by.
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.
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".
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)
Ie democracy is burning to the ground in the US but we need to hear more about LLMs and raising a funding round.
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.
Have you considered that it could be that left wingers are more likely to submit political posts on a technology forum rather than right wingers only flagging left wing posts?
I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it.
Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag.
Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information!
Sigh.
sometime I have the feeling having a username that ends with "xx" does not help much :)