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DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

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Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#61

Post by dang »

mdhb wrote: post #31
77pt77 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are (also) dead. Dead means, to my understanding, killed by moderation.

I don’t know why it’s supposed to be some secret but there is absolutely an effort here from multiple parties to minimise conversation on the topic. We can debate the reasons and logic as to why that might be but to pretend it isn’t happening is just silly.

I'm not interested in minimizing conversation on the topic! I just want the conversation to be fresh in each major thread. That requires enough new information to support a substantively different discussion. I didn't see that in the OP and I don't see that in most of the submissions that get posted about this topic.

In case anyone is interested: the way we approach situations like this comes out of what happened with the Snowden avalanche of 2013. It seems obvious now, but at the time we weren't clear about the difference between articles containing significant new information [1] and copycat / follow-up posts [2]. Tons of repetitive stories were on the frontpage, and there was a backlash from users complaining about it. The current principles around to handle this came from reflecting on how we could have handled that situation differently.

What we need here, in order to keep having major threads about this topic, is a story containing significant new information—something that moves the needle on the discussion. If one of those is getting flagged, I'd like to know about it!

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#62

Post by 77pt77 »

dang wrote: post #55
77pt77 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are (also) dead. Dead means, to my understanding, killed by moderation.

Definitely not—nearly all [dead] posts are killed by software, other than the [flagged][dead] ones which are killed by user flags.

> nearly all [dead] posts are killed by software

What do you mean by that?

Broken link detectors?

I don't get it.

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#63

Post by dang »

77pt77 wrote: post #62
dang wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not—nearly all [dead] posts are killed by software, other than the [flagged][dead] ones which are killed by user flags.

> nearly all [dead] posts are killed by software What do you mean by that? Broken link detectors? I don't get it.

HN's software contains spam filters and similar things that automatically kill certain posts. Those get marked as [dead] and removed from public view. [dead] posts are visible only to users who have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile.

Other posts that have been heavily flagged by users get marked as [flagged][dead]. Those have been killed by user flags, not software.

Have I answered your question?

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#65

Post by tmaly »

mdhb wrote: post #28
disposition2 wrote: post #24

> The White House wouldn't comment directly on Coristine's employment, but an official who discussed the situation on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters said all DOGE staffers under Musk were working as employees of relevant agencies with security clearances. It sounds like they might want to review how they are doing security clearance reviews (assuming they aren't just a blank check for this gr…

Actual real life clearances take between 6 - 12 months or longer depending on backlogs. These people have zero actual “vetting” but “presidential authority” can just say to give them clearances on the spot which is what happened here. So they have the legal bit of paperwork but it doesn’t actually mean anything. It was just an override of the regular checks and balances and would you believe it it turns out it’s fill…

Does the president have the authority to grant immediate security clearances?

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#66

Post by drweevil »

So, if a post contains the 4-letter acronym DOGE the Elon hall monitors jump into action and flag it.

This is getting tedious, as are the arguments made to justify flagging the posts. "This has already been discussed." Fine. Start flagging AI posts then. "This has nothing to with tech." But it has everything to do with tech, and one of the most influential players in tech, and how hubris blinds techies into thinking that they have tech answers to all problems (a bit of Dunning-Kruger).

Here are the misconceptions behind the entire idea of DOGE:

* Government waste is assumed as a given. No citations needed.

* Government agencies should be run like a business (or worse, a startup). But government agencies are not businesses. They don't have investors. Their mission is not to make a profit. It is to provide a service and a social good, mandated by Congress. Ideological disagreement with that service or good does not make this waste. The idea that entities like the US Post Office operates at a "loss" is arrant nonsense. The value provided is in the service, without the overhead load of investors.

* "Government bureaucrats" (said with contempt and disdain). Right wing propaganda notwithstanding, these folk are the domain experts in running a government (see point above). The trend of the last decade or so has been to replace many of the lower levels with call centers and/or websites, to the frustration of millions of citizens who require these services.

The tl;dr is that the DOGE ppl don't have a clue. They are operating on false assumptions, and likely are running roughshod over the law. Bulls in a china shop fits here.

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#67

Post by anigbrowl »

dang wrote: post #58
anigbrowl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't. It's a critique of the argument.

"You know perfectly well" is a way of accusing another person of being disingenuous and this is a step into personal attack. We don't know what others know—that would require being a mind-reader—and it's against the site guidelines to be aggressive about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We have a good idea because other people have comment histories and have demonstrated their own linguistic analytical skills on many occasions.

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#68

Post by itronitron »

dang wrote: post #44
relaxing wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if this standard was applied to any other topic. “We’ve already had four Rust topics this month, better flag any new ones!” This article is not the same news as the others you’ve listed. It’s disingenuous to claim they’re all the same.

Avoiding repetition is a core principle here. It applies to every topic. I've written extensively in the last few days explaining the moderation approach to cases like this. Let me dig up some links for you... Edit: here's one post that covers the basics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 . If you (or anyone) want further explanation, here are links that cover some of the principles we're applying here: m…

>> it's not enough to demand that we unflag more stories about a specific $Topic that some users feel strongly about. That argument doesn't work because there is always such a $Topic going on.

Your line of reasoning doesn't make any sense.

Flagging the story hides valuable information, and if the topic is always going on then there is clearly interest in the community.

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#69

Post by itronitron »

like_any_other wrote: post #29
mdhb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part where he tries to point to a handful of exceptions to refute the idea that discussions about Musk are getting flagged en mass. It’s really not a difficult bit of text to parse. Edit: I have to reply to the comment below by editing this comment because I’ve now been banned from making new comments but I couldn’t help but notice you managed to take the original quote and literally remove half of it which would…

But the claim was "No discussion of this sort shall be allowed on hn", and his data shows that significant discussion is happening. Mass flagging doesn't change this. That is despite violating HN's "intellectual curiosity" rule.

It's not violating HN's "intellectual curiosity" rule as many people are genuinely curious about this.

Re: DOGE member previously fired by cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets

#70

Post by dang »

itronitron wrote: post #68
dang wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoiding repetition is a core principle here. It applies to every topic. I've written extensively in the last few days explaining the moderation approach to cases like this. Let me dig up some links for you... Edit: here's one post that covers the basics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 . If you (or anyone) want further explanation, here are links that cover some of the principles we're applying here: m…

>> it's not enough to demand that we unflag more stories about a specific $Topic that some users feel strongly about. That argument doesn't work because there is always such a $Topic going on. Your line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. Flagging the story hides valuable information, and if the topic is always going on then there is clearly interest in the community.

If my point didn't make sense, it may be because I compressed it too much. Here's some background information followed by a decompressed version of that specific point.

The optimal HN front page is not one consisting of stories that the strongest-feeling subsets of users feel strongest about. That would optimize for indignation and sensationalism—definitely incompatible with HN's mandate.

The tug-of-war between upvotes and flags is core to HN's functioning. Indignant and/or sensational stories are often propelled onto the frontpage by 'hot' upvotes and then demoted by 'cold' flags. For the most part, that's the system working as intended. Not having flags at all, which is (I think?) what you're arguing for, would definitely not be in the interests of the site.

There's unfortunately* still a need for moderation, though, because some stories stay on the front page even though they're not so good (I mean 'good' in the specific sense of 'in keeping with the site mandate), and some stories get flagged off the front page even though they are legit submissions that could produce good-for-HN threads.

Now here's a decompressed version of the point you quoted:

If it were a rare thing for a topic to get flagged even though some users care strongly about it, we could just turn off the flags whenever that happened. However, there are always topics going on that some users care strongly about, which other users want to flag. To unflag all of them would (practically) amount to not having flags at all, and that's not an option. Therefore, there needs to be some way of deciding which ones to unflag vs. to leave flagged; and the argument for this cannot just be "please turn off the flags because I really care about this story"—that would be treating one subset of users more favorably than others. Similarly, it can't be "let's turn off the flags because we (the mods) personally care about the story". There needs to be an argument from principle about why a given story is a good candidate for turning off flags (or not turning off flags). If people want to argue that about a particular story, then, they need to either show how (1) this is desirable given HN's principles as I've explained them; or (2) there could be different principles that are better at realizing the site mandate. Does that make more sense now?

* unfortunately, because it would be so much less work if there weren't!

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