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LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

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Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Really not tooting my own horn but I qualified very early for the vaccine because I am a “farm worker” and while I really do work at a farm and all employees qualified early, I’m actually a robotics engineer with no necessary contact between me and those that tend the fields. I have an isolated office and I work alone. I felt that if I ever decided to get the shot because of my employment as a “farm worker”, t…

Shot in the arm as soon as it is offered saves lives by being one less person that will spread the virus to someone vulnerable.

Shots in arms for people in neighborhoods with a much higher rate of infection and death from COVID are more valuable than shots in arms in neighborhoods like mine where people could work from home and were basically unscathed.

I understand what you’re saying but the neighborhoods in question weren’t prioritized randomly.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#462
post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got vaccinated at one of these West Oakland "first come, first serve" vaccination sites back in March. They were administering J&J vaccines (which do not thaw) with no residency check, and not even a poster saying "please don't line up unless you live in this neighborhood." No statement of intent at all. Others standing in line asked coordinators walking the line, "Am I eligible here?" and the coordinators responde…

They don't ask for proof of poverty at a food bank either. And "Am I eligible here" could be seen about specifically asking about age/preconditions eligibility. In fact, that whole conversation could have been changed trivially to picking up free food at a food bank and would not have looked out of place. As for "if you're offered a vaccine take it", I don't think that applies to "I can go somewhere to get offered th…

They didn’t skirt some eligibility rules because no one asked questions. The west Oakland site first tried reaching out to local low income community members and after seeing low uptake opened it up to everyone one, the pastor of the church himself was encouraging anyone over 18 to come by.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all true. But US internet culture has changed dramatically in the past few years. And it's not just "eternal September". I miss the early years. There are still vestiges left. Some public intellectuals still respond to unsolicited email from strangers.

> Some public intellectuals still respond to unsolicited email from strangers. Fauci is on that list, isn't he? I was kinda surprised to learn that from the email dump. I figured his email would be thoroughly filtered. Of course, whether he actually qualifies as an intellectual seems up for debate these days.

Wow, the political partisans are out in force today. I wish HN could be above the fray, but alas...

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m one independent contractor doing engineering at one farm. I’d be surprised if I was even on whatever list was used to estimate what must be tens of thousands of farm workers in CA. In fact farm workers are so often undocumented they cannot have an accurate tally.

I don't think it matters. They wanted to pipeline people, knowing that some would technically qualify but be lower priority, but efficiency was the most important thing. That and each person getting vaccinated means less risk to them, less risk to spread to others, and less risk to mutation.

That argument only applies if they are demand limited. If they are, sure, great, get a vaccine. If they aren't, then you are quite literally keeping someone else from getting a vaccine.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am chill. You're misinterpreting things. It's perfectly reasonable things may never go perfect. However. Things become sketchy when Dang changes the title and pins his own opinion at the head of the comment section. Gossip and news are literally the same thing. It feeds and lights up the same areas of the brain. It's hard to say whether this is gossip or news because from this guys post it looks like he got kicked…

Dang changed according to the > decade old rules. He also added ~"there's 2 sides of a story". I don't see why Dang wouldn't be allowed to add a comment regarding this topic. Every post about a company has an employee/CEO stating an opinion and often even stating their side. Even if you would think Dang's opinion is subjective ( which i didn't interpret as such). Why would that suddenly be a problem? I said chill for…

>He also added ~"there's 2 sides of a story". I don't see why Dang wouldn't be allowed to add a comment regarding this topic.

The fact that it's the top post is the most questionable thing here, it seems pinned to the top.

The statement is seemingly fair and balanced but make no mistake it's not. A common technique among corporations and public relations experts is to try to seemingly be fair about things that are obviously wrong. A good example of this is educational creationism in the US. Many schools want to teach a fair and balanced view of biology by teaching both evolution and creationism. Like dang himself said, there are two sides to every story after all.

I never said Dang should be banned from commenting. It is a dictatorship after all. His opinion and comment and the fact that it's the top comment in this thread makes the whole thing sketchy. And that is all I am remarking on.

If I were him and my intentions were to be neutral I woulda just left the topic completely alone.

>Good moderation is too much undervalued from my POV. You only notice it when it's gone.

This is off topic. I'm not talking about moderation here as something to get rid of. My topic is the conflict of interest that has to do with this thread and dangs comment on it. That's it.

>If I'm free to give my opinion, you seem to frustrated because people don't agree with you. I understand, it's normal and human behavior. You are not above it.

You are, and I appreciate your opinion. I never said I was above it. But here you are again, after telling me to chill you tell me that I seem frustrated. Again it's your bias talking and inserting false emotions into places where none exists. I am simply explaining why I disagree with you.

>As an example your most recent comment, first line: >> Any post that challenges dang will likely get voted down. >It's snarky against a highly respected member that is part of the team that makes this forum HN.

It's not snarky dude. It's true. If I call someone who murdered 10 people a killer am I being snarky? No. I'm remarking on a fact. Now I admit I'm criticizing him but open and polite criticism is part of the spirit of HN.

Anyway this subthread has already degraded to uninteresting talk that's against the spirit of HN. I would say normally dang would probably kill this subthread if he saw it, but he may not in effort to appear fair and balanced. That's a good thing. But that doesn't mean you should just ignore the conflict of interest at play here. Either way, it's best not to continue this debate, I've made my point and you evidently disagree but neither of us can definitively prove whether censorship is happening or if it isn't so let's end it here.

>Full of human behavior ( as you like to mention), because it doesn't fit your endgoal. Downplaying that the post isn't deleted, while admitting that the moderation was fair.

And what is my endgoal? I have repeatedly said he could not be censoring things and that he also could Why didn't you bring those up? Are you CHERRYPICKING??? No you're not, you're simply not clear about what I am saying so I am clarifying the facts to you.

My end goal here is to remark that the actions dang took here are a conflict of interest and that makes his post highly sus. Does it mean dang doesn't do good things? No. Does it mean dang has never done no evil? No. It means that what he is doing here for this specific post is sketchy. THAT is my end goal.

>Useless content :)

See. This is rude and the smiley face is truly snark. This is actually against the rules of HN. A deliberate violation. I wonder how dang would react to this kind that kind of remark. Truly a test of his ability to stay centered and unbiased. Most likely he won't do anything given the context.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Really not tooting my own horn but I qualified very early for the vaccine because I am a “farm worker” and while I really do work at a farm and all employees qualified early, I’m actually a robotics engineer with no necessary contact between me and those that tend the fields. I have an isolated office and I work alone. I felt that if I ever decided to get the shot because of my employment as a “farm worker”, t…

Shot in the arm as soon as it is offered saves lives by being one less person that will spread the virus to someone vulnerable.

I should probably have been at the end of the list. I work from home, had a pod that works from home and we're all able to take precautions when we go to the stores. A grocery store cashier faces people for 8 hours a day and is therefore a huge risk to themselves and to all their customers. There's no reason to claim the two of us are at all equivalent (assuming that we are in the same personal risk group.)

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#467

I'm the person this original tweet was about. None of you know any of the internal details but what I can state is that Paul has no idea what he's talking about and later admits to the fact I wasn't lying. Here's the order of events: 1. I went to a neighborhood clinic in Oakland, CA that's literally next door to my house, I can see the church from my window. Paul lives in NYC which is on the opposite end of the count…

FWIW: Early on California had a no leftover doses policy. But what do you do when you have more vaccines than eligible people? You lower the eligibility requirements. This probably wasn't official policy but it was required of vaccination site runners to comply with the policy, so as they got towards the end of the day and they still had doses leftover they probably started jabbing anyone who walked in. I don't know what the consequences were from having leftover doses, but they were severe enough that some sites started doing this kind of thing.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang changed according to the > decade old rules. He also added ~"there's 2 sides of a story". I don't see why Dang wouldn't be allowed to add a comment regarding this topic. Every post about a company has an employee/CEO stating an opinion and often even stating their side. Even if you would think Dang's opinion is subjective ( which i didn't interpret as such). Why would that suddenly be a problem? I said chill for…

>He also added ~"there's 2 sides of a story". I don't see why Dang wouldn't be allowed to add a comment regarding this topic. The fact that it's the top post is the most questionable thing here, it seems pinned to the top. The statement is seemingly fair and balanced but make no mistake it's not. A common technique among corporations and public relations experts is to try to seemingly be fair about things that are ob…

> "The fact that it's the top post is the most questionable thing here, it seems pinned to the top."

I thought he might have pinned it, but that isn't the case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401409

> "I certainly didn't intend it to be the top comment; that was entirely by upvotes."

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang changed according to the > decade old rules. He also added ~"there's 2 sides of a story". I don't see why Dang wouldn't be allowed to add a comment regarding this topic. Every post about a company has an employee/CEO stating an opinion and often even stating their side. Even if you would think Dang's opinion is subjective ( which i didn't interpret as such). Why would that suddenly be a problem? I said chill for…

>He also added ~"there's 2 sides of a story". I don't see why Dang wouldn't be allowed to add a comment regarding this topic. The fact that it's the top post is the most questionable thing here, it seems pinned to the top. The statement is seemingly fair and balanced but make no mistake it's not. A common technique among corporations and public relations experts is to try to seemingly be fair about things that are ob…

You're response to my appreciation of moderation is ( while you are protesting against any moderation outside of the community ):

> This is off topic.

You are literally comparing things with ( in 1 post): China, covid, dictatorship, serial killers, censorship, educational creationism, biology in schools, ...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's an upvoted comment by a moderator... Nothing more, nothing less.

As I said before: chill.

Ps. Still useless content :)

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#470
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, since I’ve seen the situation come up before: Would you be willing to modify the title of any post to be ‘accurate’ based on non-public information, without making that information public? If so, how does one make that request, and what would the process look like? There have been a few titles I knew to be extremely misleading or false, but never thought there was a way to rectify it without publicly…

It would depend on the specific circumstances, but I can imagine doing that, or perhaps there would be something else we could do that was better; it's hard to say in general, because cases like that are always very specific. We'd want to explain as much to the community as we could without harmful side-effects, but if someone's safety or privacy is at risk, I'm comfortable telling the community so, and I'm confident…

This is a really disappointing answer. I know, I know discussing moderation here is frowned upon... but come on. You’re basically saying there’s a secondary set of rules that are decided and disclosed arbitrarily.

It’s your choice how to moderate, I don’t have any expectation or illusion of a right to use this platform. But can you understand how this creates ambiguity for people who don’t know what the rules ultimately are, and how it creates huge openings for people to cry foul when there’s nothing unusual?

Wouldn’t it be better to refine the rules and disclosure when gaps arise, so everyone is participating in the same system?

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