31–40 of 159 posts
Some HNer has set up a nice filter:
http://diff.biz/?remove=%28nsa|prism|privacy|crunch|snowden|...
It filters away all stories containing keywords nsa, prism, etc.
Please post more about Snowden, PRISM, NSA, GCHQ, and all the rest. I will upvote every one of them. For those who think that "we all know essentially how this will end", think about what the world would look like if every major change had been met with this kind of pitiful attitude. Every revolution, every change for the better, has come out of people rejecting that sentiment. It's not too late to turn away from the…
This isn't a quaint distraction that's getting in the way of us discussing serious issues like gradients in web design buttons... this is a big story and deserves to consume some HN news 'cycles'.
It is not obvious to me that either of these propositions is correct.
Do you honestly believe we've understood this surveillance complex enough that we can keep on with our lives? Why accept that "PRISM [won't go] away" or that "Snowden's fate is grim"? Honestly? Is this cause not worth fighting for anymore?
Most of these stories themselves are at best tangentially related to the larger issue. Upvoting them or reading a story about Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie is not doing anything to fight for civil liberties, though it will give views to garbage web sites like Business Insider and its ilk.
"Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie" "Kim Dotcom braids his hair!" "Julian Assange orders Cherry Coke instead of regular!" "Elon Musk buys three rare white leopards!"
Do you really like to argue by ridiculing others this much? There hasn't been a story even resembling anything like this, people have actually upvoted things they found interesting.
More links means more people are writing about it. This is good.
Please post more about Snowden, PRISM, NSA, GCHQ, and all the rest. I will upvote every one of them. For those who think that "we all know essentially how this will end", think about what the world would look like if every major change had been met with this kind of pitiful attitude. Every revolution, every change for the better, has come out of people rejecting that sentiment. It's not too late to turn away from the…
Also, are you sure it's not too late?
This is a problem with Hacker News. Maybe because most people can't downvote (or I dunno some other reason), it has a big big problem with duplicate stories. When Steve Jobs died for example, 30/30 stories were "Steve Jobs has died" for quite some time. It is irritating, that's for sure.
People should be visiting new and flagging articles that don't belong here, and upvoting good articles.
It's a bit worrying that "over flagging" could cause someone to lose their ability to flag articles - some users have reported that.
Still, most of the Snowden articles are garbage and should be flagged.
Yeah, sure, I don't care what he had for lunch or whether he's sitting in the aisle or window seat, but as far as getting attention on HN? What else would you expect?
If it bothers you, take the bigrss feed here and put it through an rss filter to remove the articles you do not like? I did that for Steve Jobs. I personally want to read every new element about the Snowden effect but I realize not everyone else does.
This doesn't solve the bigger problem, namely, that posting countless stories on Snowden is really killing HN. Seriously, we're one step away from having stories on what Snowden had for lunch on his flight to Moscow on the front page. I don't buy the "Let the community decide what should be on the front page" argument either. Communities tend to follow the same laws of entropy like anything else in this universe. Without a certain number of people putting in considerable effort to keep up the quality of submitted articles and discussions, they tend to devolve into places with a bunch of articles that bring nothing new to the table, and with discussions that are nothing more than long, tiresome rants or flame wars that have no real value.