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Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043

The linked deleted thread was 90 minutes older than the thread that 'survived'. Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption. Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments? Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's lis…

I think some major newspapers are 'downvoted' by default, as so many off-topic articles from them are posted.

I think I read this from a comment from dang.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#372
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "self evident" yet a large Cochrane meta-analysis finds no benificial effect of masks whatsoever: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

You sure? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs... When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason for studies showing masks not working is that people don't wear it correctly or at all.

>You sure? >https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...

That's just one RCT. The Cochrane meta-analysis looked at a bunch of them.

>When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless.

You're putting the cart before the horse. In an ideal world, guidelines for the medical field are based on scientific evidence. But there's always a delay.

You better consult the scientific evidence to make up your mind.

When it comes to covid and masking, policymakers will wait as long as possible before aknowledging the evidence, because they know the public hasn't forgotten the draconian masking of school kids yet.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the flagging you already have access to (as you have more than 30 karma). It's the flag option. There's nothing special otherwise that I'm aware of (at least at 2500 karma)

At some point you get the option to vouch for flagged posts as well.

>30 karma, same as flagging: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#374
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empirically they are not. What you mean is that you don't like to be faced with the reality revealed by these stories and the comments. But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just d…

Comments like this really make me feel viscerally what we're missing out on by not having COVID fights on the front page more often. Thanks.

This isn't actually COVID specific. It's a nasty and frequent tactic on this forum, where someone makes strong assertions about one side of an argument whilst simultaneously claiming that the other side can't be allowed to speak because it would be "fighting", a "flamewar", a "trash fire", "not curious", "tedious" or whatever. It's an attempt to manipulate the site rules to suppress debate and is itself anti-curious.

Concrete examples from your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32104731

"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."

(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).

In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."

If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#375
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily want to dissect every little story, but this post was a funny edge case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39203106 a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the comments as expected. I search for other submissions and see two other posts... with 0 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190710 https://news.ycombinator.c…

We try to, and often users help by, posting links to the previous discussions in the thread. But there isn't enough time to do that in all of them. In this case, you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that there had been a lot of submissions, and from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... the ones that got comments. Of those, https://news.ycombinator…

Ahh, that would explain it. Showdead is off on my account and I guess I didn't find every result on my end. That's a shame. But thank you!

> could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)

Yeah, i imagine if I went down every tiny rabbit hole it'd be a full time job. I'll leave that to the professionals haha.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#376

> In the case of the first, the Story was among the first on the Front Page, until its title was changed from "Stable Diffusion Turbo on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 generates an image in 29 minutes" to "OnnxStream: Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Base on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2". This effectively "killed" the Story. > In the case of the second, the Story was in third place on the Front Page, less than an hour after the submission. I…

> I don't have flagging privilege

Looks like you should? Is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re... wrong? You need to be on a comment's page; click its timestamp to get there.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#377
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only person who could answer that is pg because that design choice was part of the embryo of HN. He must have been thinking something though, because Reddit was originally his conception and he was an influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to mention that bit).

It's good that this is in this thread, as I bet a ton of power users (I check HN multiple times a day for years but likely only a time or two have glossed over the FAQ), did not know FLAG could be used as a downvote tool. Interesting choice by PG, I agree with the previous comment, we have all come to know FLAG as a violation tool on most platforms. Now we know.

I'm surprised by this thread too.

I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up my profile.

Actually I just checked my profile and saw several flags that must have appeared on a mis-click, just like how sometimes upvotes appear on a mis-click. Fortunately, unlike mis-clicked upvotes, you can still remove these.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#378
post #133

> The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been explicitly removed. That's wrong. Both the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and user flags do that, and there are other software mechanisms that do it too. For example, if a story has been on the front page for more than (IIRC) 18 hours, it gets an automatic down…

How do you keep user flags from being used as a way to squash articles on a particular topic before they have had the chance to be exposed to the wider HN community? Meaning if someone were to theoretically get a real time feed of HN submissions, and flagged articles that they didn't want seen as well as messaging a group of friends to do the same thing. Do you have protections for this type of behavior that would pr…

I just posted about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235382. The relevant part is in the middle of that rather, er, wallish text, but if you read it (assuming you find it!) and have a question I didn't answer, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that this is in this thread, as I bet a ton of power users (I check HN multiple times a day for years but likely only a time or two have glossed over the FAQ), did not know FLAG could be used as a downvote tool. Interesting choice by PG, I agree with the previous comment, we have all come to know FLAG as a violation tool on most platforms. Now we know.

I'm surprised by this thread too. I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up…

Do you happen to remember if the misclicks were on mobile or not? I'm planning to add a confirmation screen to cut down on flags-by-misclick, but the current intention is to make it mobile-only.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#380
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has). All from only one day: * Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr... * Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germa…

Not sure why both submissions about work preferences were flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483

Users flagged them. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it might have been the desire to avoid gender flamewar hell, which is mostly always the same and which HN has had more than enough of. Also, one of the submissions was paywalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39104886), while the other was just the tweet of a graphic.

We sometimes turn flags off on such submissions, assuming that the article is substantive enough to have a chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion; and also assuming that the topic hasn't been discussed recently. But neither of those particular submissions was likely to be such a solid foundation.

It doesn't look like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00169862231175831, the paper, has been submitted yet. That one might work, if you or someone wants to try submitting it.

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