You should probably revisit the guidelines, as your flagging policy doesn’t align with HN guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I think people might be missing the hack here, because the front story is such an ongoing political (and moral) football.
The hack is in the leak, and the sudden availability, of the video segment, across international borders, against the Weiss will (and apparently against the Ellison and Trump will), rebounding back to us in the US via the good graces of https://archive.org and via some true journalistic (or political) chutzpah.
That's what drew me to this page, to learn more about how presumed underhanded corrupt billionaire-sanctioned censorship was defeated by an innocent premature distribution.
When we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest or curiosity. For example, there is social curiosity (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political curiosity (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual curiosity (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
The qualifier "most" is very important there. Certainly opinions can differ as to what should fall under "most" and what shouldn't. But citing that line to justify flagging a politics-related story isn't a good argument.
Yep - I totally got that from your original comment.
I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.
My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.
Thanks for the sanity/perspective.
[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.
Pretty sure HN has discussed porn, the porn industry, sex work, sex workers, etc tons.
For example you can find in my history on posts about how porn access is being restricted that the "They have more fraud" claim is likely false and claimed in bad faith, and in fact Pornhub has been so removed from the payments industry that they now seem to have grafted themselves onto the internet gambling industry to make money, which is just awful. They have not turned to crypto payments because they just don't work, which is interesting to discuss.
But you would never see any of those discussions if you banned from the front page anything that mentioned porn.
Do you see how that works? Interesting discussion is about who is discussing, not about what is being discussed.
IMO the topic guidelines are entirely the wrong way to ensure meaningful discussion. All they have done, as clearly evidenced by the time HN tried to outright ban politics, is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to participate in and contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here", despite the guidelines themselves saying "If it's here, it belongs here"
HN also bans a lot of meta discussion which is crap, as talking about the sneaky and intransparent parts of HN, like the Orange Nametag cohort, would be interesting to the constant influx of new accounts.
I for one would also find deep dives into moderation or site meta information to be very interesting. I deal with abuse prevention in my day job, so seeing how others experience that abuse and deal with it would be not just interesting to me, but downright educational.
Meanwhile, HN is full of "I slapped an LLM into someone else's open source code" as if that is interesting at all. The entire point of vibe coding and agents etc is that anyone else could do that just as easily. So it seems "being interesting to hackers" just isn't the actual desired content.
>All [the guidelines] have done ... is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to ... contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here"
Absolutely. See /u/grey's comment above, which /u/DanG responded with saying ~"no personal attacks"~ (I don't think grey got personal, and I don't think DanG's response was appropriate/warranted).
But as DanG and you have pointed out (in response to my other comments in this thread), porn does have a place on /hn/ — I truly believe the porn industry is the major driver of consumer tech.
Respectfully submitted, and thanks for all the great discussions among ALL users, oranges/admins/®ulars.
There's also some other relevance to tech here, given the role of the Ellisons in all this. It's quite possible the decision to pull the episode came from them. Paramount is trying steal Warner Bros out from under Netflix and is working the Trump admin hard to prevent the deal, even supposedly by telling Trump he can decide who gets hired/fired from CNN.
Andreessen was directly involved in the rise of Bari Weiss too.
I hate to attack HN and especially any particular moderator. But I agree in the abstract that this is an unacceptable performance. When you have Larry Ellison's son appoint a political figure over a news organization and start axing things, that's Tech news-worthy.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
It's a bummer, but discussions about the intersections of politics and tech are especially important when many prominent figures in SV are inserting themselves directly into politics or are funding inherently political projects. It's clear, for many of them, their values are misaligned with many core democratic values and sometimes even human rights.
Musk and DOGE killed an estimated 600,000 people, mostly kids under 5, and the death hasn't abated yet. Tech workers helped him do it.
If you'd rather not be the kind of useful idiot who helps a megalomaniacal tech billionaire rack up the body count of an early 20th century despot, politics are unfortunately unavoidable.
