901–910 of 1001 posts
Hi dang. About 45m ago, I added a comment [1] in the Amazon GO mega-thread that mentions the concept of religion. Is this comment acceptable per new policy? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108455 (Aside: I believe that this detox experiment is treading on dangerous ground, that it will be a struggle to contain the amount of censorship that will happen as a result of encouraging people to flag each other in…
To toe the line between censorship and curation is an incredibly difficult task and I think, as a civilization, it's a fundamental problem. The thought and care and effort that's going into this problem right now is deeply important and I'm grateful towards those who take it seriously, and it's clear that dang (and other HN moderators) are of this class of people. So my only piece of (hopefully) constructive criticis…
This is a terrible decision. The tech industry has built powerful tools of social control, and runs vast databases of private data on pretty much everyone in the country. We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry. We need to be talking about the political implication…
I don't mean to offend, but I think that this is not a rational comment. I think it illustrates my point that rational discourse can rapidly become irrational when politics get involved. Again, I stress that this is why I am strongly in favor of a moratorium on politics on HN. You express a fear that Trump is going to somehow strongarm, subpoena, or otherwise force tech companies to roll over and give over private da…
The political opposition is likely to collapse in waves: public opinion seems to be moving towards intolerance, and any additional terrorist attacks related to Islam would continue the shift; the GOP controlled Congress may support Trump as vehemently as they have opposed Obama; the 105 federal judicial vacancies that should have been filled by Obama will instead be filled by Trump, possibly including multiple Supreme Court seats; and it will be very difficult for the companies themselves to fail to comply with court orders. For example, look at the huge battle to coerce Apple to unlock a single phone. Under a Trump presidency there would be substantially more pressure on tech companies.
My experience with conservative, religiously-motivated Americans (including many dear friend and family members) while growing up in a red state makes me think that (some subset) may be willing to tolerate substantial harm to themselves, the economy, and the founding principals of the USA so long as the "greater good" is achieved: prohibiting abortion, increasing the influence of Christianity on government, increased need for religious charity due to reduced social welfare programs, and the lower taxes that they've been told are a panacea. This makes me believe that compromising with Trump will look more like acquiescing to him.
I also think that some portion of the the conservative-leaning public was misled about Obama and were afraid of what they thought he would do, not what he said he would do. What could have been reasonable compromises about restricting certain types of gun sales and ownership, controlling healthcare costs through single payer policies or some other government intervention (which are considered mainstream in other first world countries) were opposed as a slippery slope to elimination of private gun ownership and destruction of American capitalism. These were not rational fears, but were effective at catalyzing conservative voters.
Here's an article that was on the front page when I clicked into this discussion: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/librarians-act-now-pro... Is this political?
I thought this was already every week on HN. There are very few politics related articles. Pushing the point is a bit much IMO.
How do you draw boundaries of what's political? Everything is political - rules for how and where Cars can drive, rules for who can host whom in their house, gender equality and the job market, drones, and accountability abroad, encryption and government surveillance. It's impossible to have a conversation about Uber, AirBnB, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Twitter without talking about whom it affects and how.
dang, doing things like this is turning HN more into reddit with heavy-handing modding, than just letting the community dictate for itself what it wants to see. The community has existed and guided itself a lot longer than the time you've been around, I think you should trust us.
HN is a complex system of community, software, and moderation. We like to place the emphasis on community too, but those other things also have their places.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. I would argue that the "don't discuss politics or religion" with family and friends is partly what got us into this mess in the first place. The United States has become a nation where you can't have reasonable political discourse, because we've been taught not to talk about it. We put our heads in the sand and repeat our same beliefs over and over without any external challenge or validation. When we try to h…
If this is a topic you're interested in, I think you'll find Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" particularly useful. I've read it through twice and it's helped me better understand the nature of the issue.
Not a gripe but an idea: rather than ban persons from HN for bad behavior, would it possibly be better to "emprison" them, that is, disallow them from posting for awhile and then, after a few days or weeks, permit them to resume posting? Reason I ask this is that I recently encountered an HN situation where someone who appeared to be a productive member of the HN community was banned from posting because of (truly) p…
We effectively have that already, because if users continue to post good comments after being banned, other users will vouch for those and we review vouched comments. When someone who was banned reforms their ways and starts abiding by the site rules, we unban them. Of course that can be a slow process, but anyone who doesn't want to be banned is invited to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that…