I'd like to thank Meta for permanently banning all of my accounts with no warning and no ability to appeal a few months ago. Now no need to waste money on these overpriced spy goggles.
It's a separate writeup by a separate author though, and with 500+ comments, it still seems relevant. From #1 on HN to completely disappeared. Bring it back, I say.
On HN, dupeness is more a question of whether the underlying story is substantively the same or not—or, to put it slightly differently, whether the follow-up submission is able to support a substantively different discussion or not.
In this case, the answers appear to be yes, it's substantively the same story, and no, it can't support a substantively different discussion than the previous major thread. That's why we'd treat the follow-up submission as a dupe.
This is in no way passing judgment about the importance of the story! It's just that if we weren't careful and proactive about moderating HN in this way, the frontpage would rapidly fill up with variations on the hottest stories of the moment, and avoiding repetition is a core principle here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
I wrote a long explanation about exactly this the other day—if you (or anyone) is willing to take a look at that (assuming you have the stamina) and still have a question that isn't already answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815.
p.s. The current case is unfortunate because the follow-up/duplicate post came a week later than the original thread. If it were hours later, or a day or two later, as is more typical, we would merge the threads and in this way avoid a split discussion. But 7 days is too wide a chasm to merge across.
I suppose it's just a bit frustrating that HN is one of the few places left on the internet where we can have a mostly civilized discussion about politics. I had missed the discussion from 7 days ago so this was news to me (and I'm sure most of the other commenters). If you miss the one chance to discuss that one topic, it can never be discussed again on HN.
I'm not opposed to this rule for moderation, and I understand the reasoning behind it. But it seems like we're just watching the country burn and when stories like this get suppressed to make room for a new rust package manager, it makes me all nihilistic.
Your argument is likely not with their beliefs or preferences, but the embodied practices of HN moderation. Which can themselves be problematic as they have a strong status quo bias, as I've pointed out repeatedly:
For what it's worth: if it's one of the few places you can still have a civilized discussion about politics, that's at least in part because we don't talk about politics very often here. Every time we do, some of the civility of the site chips away. Since the whole premise of the site is to investigate how long we can stave off Eternal September, this seems an important consideration.
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying those internal checks are a good thing; I mean that the President already has extensive mechanisms to control what these agencies do.
Not every forum needs to be an arena for your polarized world views. This used to be a place where all types of scientific and tech related content was posted. Not so much right now, everyone is just throwing shit at each other but with nicer choice of words than on Twitter.
And this forum isn’t specifically made for you. Ignore it and move on. Just like other people do for other subjects they aren’t interested in. The ego to think that things that don’t interest you specifically have no place here while plenty of others are engaging just fine.
Of course it isn't made for me, and I do not expect it to be. The fact that you assume so points to a lack of empathy on your end, something that I think most Americans could really use more of right now.
As another sibling comment previously stated, this forum is mainly for employees of US tech companies. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that this forum could do more to keep the number of polarizing non-tech topics to a minimum - there are plenty of other forums where those discussions can and do happen. It's not like there's a tech twist to the political discussions here anyway, it's just poop flinging like everywhere else.
Sure not every needs it but this is US page so it is more likely to discuss US related things here.
As someone who is not from English speaking country, I get that you may expect forum in English language to be neutral / international, but usually (as with any other language) it is not.
Or just leave your phone in the car and pay with cash...