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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point here is that it seems extremely unlikely image search results is the actual result of a sift through the available indexed data. Meaning that some manual mechanism is responsible for the page being blank.
It must be. There is nothing in the words "tank man" that would trigger any sort of filter. My guess is that this was supposed to be limited to Chinese IP's and someone forgot to add that to the config.
@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward. EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have respond…
Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue.
Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925. When you see [flagged] on a submission, you should assume users flagged it because with rare exceptions, that's always why.
A moderator saw that, but didn't look very closely and thought "yeah that's probably garden-variety controversy/drama" and left the flags on. No moderator saw any of the other posts until I woke up, turned on HN, and—surprise!—saw the latest $outrage.
Software marked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 a dupe for the rather esoteric reasons explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622. After that, the current post got upvoted to the front page, where it remains.
In other words, nothing was co-ordinated and the dots weren't connected. This was just the usual stochastic churn that generates HN. Most days it generates the HN you're used to and some days (quite a few days actually) it generates the next outlier, but that's how stochastics work, yes? If you're a boat on a choppy sea, sometimes some waves slosh into the boat. If you're a wiggly graph, sometimes the graph goes above a line.
If I put myself in suspicious shoes, I can come up with objections to the above, but I can also answer them pretty simply: this entire thing was a combo of two data points, one borderline human error [1] and one software false positive. We don't know how to make software that doesn't do false positives and we don't know how to make humans that don't do errors. And we don't know how to make those things not happen at the same time sometimes. This is what imperfect systems do, so it's not clear to me what needs changing. If you think something needs changing, I'm happy to hear it, but please make it obvious how you're not asking for a perfect system, because I'm afraid that's not an option.
[1] I will stick up for my teammate and say that this point is arguable; I might well have made the same call and it's far from obvious that it was the wrong call at the time. But we don't need that for this particular answer, so I'll let that bit go.
In case you're wondering why this is news, there are numerous obvious, worldwide, relevant results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/25-years-later-tank-man-st... (Note: Microsoft owns this page!) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/remembering-the-t...
Microsoft does not have a stake in MSNBC anymore.
@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward. EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have respond…
[flagged]
Good evening Beijing, what time is it there now... 2 AM ? Working late for the social credit ?
It doesn't really surprise me that bing does this - I'm more disappointed that HN censored the original post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ). Feel like that's totally against our values.
HN isn't policed by its admins except in extremely rare cases.
Elsewhere on HackerNews there are discussions about how GDPR regulations affect the internet entirely - not just in the EU. And there are famous examples how California environmental regulations bring up the quality of products US-wide so everyone benefits from safety and consumer protections not just people in california. In both cases, this is because it's easier to just have ONE version of a product if your market…
And let us be clear - it is bad enough when the major tech companies gladly apply CCP or RUS filtering within those territories.
The CCP is the friend of no one but themselves, and they are global expansionists. The RUS govt is an international criminal syndicate masquerading as a govt.
If the tech companies start applying those same CCP/RUS standards globally, then the response should be to shut off those countries from the internet.
[flagged]
@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward. EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have respond…
"Political" or "controversial" content is always^H^H^H^H sometimes punished by HN (sorry, dang). While I think this is a highly questionable policy which is itself political in nature (reinforcing as it does the status quo), it need not be specific to China. A statement would certainly be nice, however.