I didn't see it yesterday either, otherwise I would have turned the flags off sooner.
But thanks for the kind reply—I confess I was expecting something else!
Edit: incidentally, (and not directing this at you personally!), if even one of the commenters spending their time complaining about flags on HN had let us know about this submission at hn@ycombinator.com, this would probably have happened earlier. I say "probably" because I haven't processed all the emails from the last 12 hours yet.
- Include the post item in your subject line. That would be "42922647" for this particular story.
- Include some idea of what the problem is. For example, for a flagged story I'd have "vouch" as the first word of my subject, followed by the article title.
- I typically include the full article link (in body) and title (in subject) as insurance against my own fat-finger-fumbling.
- A brief description of the problem. E.g., "I'd like to vouch for this article".
My own typical emails are for titles (frequent), link indirection, preferred sources, and occasional mentions of flagrant violations of HN comment guidelines (flagging tends to pick those up most of the time).
For the latter, you can use the "replies" endpoint to see if a mod has previously responded to a given userID, e.g.:
Addition: Comments also have IDs (and are essentially the same as posts), and if you're referencing a specific comment or thread, that should similarly be highlighted in the email subject.
dang, for my clarification, why are you so clearly in favor of this being unflagged?
I haven't been flagging these topics, but I have defended those who do, on the grounds of "not politics" and "leads to flamewar discussions". On the politics front, you have deliberately allowed more politics recently (or at least that's my perception) when you thought it was of general interest, or of tech interest. But the discussions are, perhaps less flame-full than expected, still somewhat incindiary (not least the discussions around flagging, with accusations up to being full-on fascists aimed at those who just don't want HN to be overrun by this).
So: What made it clear to you that this was something that should not be flagged?
It may have come to your attention that 1) there's been a fair bit of political activity of late 2) with impacts on YC, startups, and many of HN's readers, and 3) involving some notable individuals within the tech world.
Much of that argues to facilitate some discussion of at least a sampling of these stories. And this particular item has garnered a large number of both votes and comments. Slightly over the "flamewar" threshold (> 40 votes, comments > votes), but not in the extreme. The flamewar-detector heuristic is surprisingly accurate (I've gone through much of HN's front-page archive a couple of years ago), but not perfect. High-profile political discussions are among the more notable exceptions. Self-discussion of HN is the other (and AFAIR the most highly-ratioed high-placed story was one such item early in HN's life).
I turned off the flags on this one because there hadn't been a thread specifically about DOGE personnel and there is a clear intersection between the people in the article and the interests of HN. I mostly mean the type of people, not the specific individuals, but at least one of them (the Vesuvius prizewinner) did work which was the subject of major threads here.
I would rather the article had been more neutral and more informative, but beggars can't be choosers.
Btw, you do realize that not all politics is off topic on HN, yes? I'm pretty sure you must have seen some of my explanations about this over the years, but if not, please take a look at some of https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
All of the following can be (indeed are) true at once: (1) most political stories are off topic here; (2) we don't want the frontpage to be dominated by politics; (3) some political stories are on topic; (4) significant and interesting things are going on right now, even though it's hard for most people to stay curious about them.
> What we're looking for includes: is the article not too repetitive of recent discussions? does it contain significant new information? is there a reasonable chance that it could support a substantive, thoughtful discussion, or is it too flamebaity/provocative?
This article is a personal attack on individual engineers that are evidently very talented.
There's now a bunch of people using HN for personal insults in the comments.
I think the flags were warranted and turning them off was unnecessary.
No, you might even be right that I have a "victim complex", given that my country is currently being victimized by the current US administration's pointless desire for a trade war. I'm especially hot under the collar at the moment.
But I would still maintain that this site's culture reflects the Silicon Valley finance culture it came from, and it's not a pretty culture.
Flags are applied by users in virtually all cases, not mods.
Contentious topics, regardless of how merited a discussion might be, tend to draw flags inordinately. But again, you generally can't blame mods for this.
(HN does systemically penalise, or outright ban, numerous sites. I strongly doubt Wired is in either category, though if you want to know for certain, you can email mods. For a number of fairly evident reasons the full list isn't publicly disclosed, though pg provided some lists and extracts early in HN's histoyry, notably <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984095>. There were 38,719 banned sites as of the end of 2012, a number which has doubtless increased.)
I didn't even mention mods in my (admittedly flamey) comment, I actually don't think the moderation of HN is a problem as much as the larger culture that comes with being tied to a SV finance company. But thanks for the info.
OpenAI once again trying to drive up hype by making ChatGPT seem mysterious and dangerous, and the tech press uncritically eats it up. Ars even invokes the tired cliche of ChatGPT getting us into nuclear war in this article. I don't know about redditors but I'm sure that ChatGPT could persuade a Tech Journalist, they seem as impressionable as children on anything AI-related.
I'm sure that Elon isn't helping, but I've read that Tesla sales were always expected to decline due to no new car in years (outside of the Cybertruck which is seen as a gimmick) and market saturation from Tesla's continued monopoly on the American EV market. Basically everybody who wants an EV already owns a Tesla and has nothing to upgrade to.
> Basically everybody who wants an EV already owns a Tesla
The EV market is not the totality of the auto market. EVs are, in my opinion, better products than gas cars even removing environmental concerns, and thus EVs should be growing market share. Tesla shares were never expected to decline, otherwise their stock wouldn't be trading at such insane multiples. It's entirely at the feet of Tesla management that their sales are declining in CA and in the EU.
There used to be a time, in the early days around 2018-2020, where "AI art" was something that only could have been made by an AI. Very trippy and resembling hallucinations. Sort of like dreams of a computer. I do miss that era of AI art. If you search "early ai art" on Google images there are some good examples.
I bought a book a few years ago called The Artist in the Machine by Arthur Miller[0] and it covers a lot of early AI creativity. I wish they shelled out for more color pages, because I agree things like DeepDream and GAN art are very trippy and would have made it a great coffee table book. It's wild that it took just two or three more years for diffusion models to hit the scene and take the world by storm.
If Kagi made a cheaper "no AI" tier I would be happy to subscribe. AI is costly to run, so even if you don't use the AI it's priced into your subscription fee - you're paying for an expensive product you don't want or use.
e: according to Kagi's pricing page they do have a 'no AI' tier, but it limits your number of searches to 300/month. Seems like a totally arbitrary limitation, but its still better than forced AI.
I understand your point in general, but I don’t think it applies to Kagi. Users were paying the same monthly fee and then the company added those features on with no extra subscription cost. I also like that it doesn’t clutter my search. It doesn’t appear unless I press the AI button or end my search with a question mark (can also be disabled).
The only extra costs are if you use the (opt-in optional) AI Assistant which is a web UI to access various models for chatting purposes. As an aside, they recently updated this UI so it’s actually usable as a ChatGPT or Claude alternative.
yeah I hit it in about two. I just signed up monthly to try it out for a bit but am wavering on whether I consider it worth it. It's good but I'm not sure it's enough better than DDG to pay for.
And for AI I'd usually rather have API access and use it with tools rather than a web chat.
I agree with everything you're saying about how hard the privacy issue is, but would also like to add that the social media companies are incentivized to act like they have no idea how to implement a solution, because they want teens using their apps. The Facebook Files make it abundantly clear that social companies see teen users are their most valuable asset, since the rest of the culture tends to follow where teens go. When the social companies, who are collectively worth tens of trillions of dollars, say they don't know how to implement the law without convoluted, privacy-destroying, digital government IDs I just don't buy it.
The government passed the law, and funds lots of universities with CS and cryptography programs. If there was a privacy-preserving solution, they could have proposed it themselves. Just because someone is motivated to say something, doesn't mean they're wrong.
They claimed to be a bank (savings account) that would give users free lottery tickets for saving money on their app. After freezing customer assets on the app, they pivoted to gambling. Customer funds are still frozen last I checked.
They're not doing "voluntary exits" out of the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it because their accountants determined that the cost of paying employees to quit outweighed the reputational damage of doing another round of mass layoffs.
Of course! But it’s better than randomly laying people off. At least it lets people who are ready to quit take the accounting impact instead of others.
Layoffs cause huge emotional trauma to people who are affected. People often slide into serious mental health issues, financial issues, etc. Often people get laid off while their peers were eyeing the door. This at least allows people to quit and take the heat off their coworkers.
Or, the accountants determined that the overall cost of voluntary exits is expected to be lower than a mass layoff. It's possible that voluntary exits make more financial sense.
Paired with the Pixel 4a "update of death" it feels like Google is throwing in the towel on smartphones. I don't care about Pixel but I do worry about Android - as flawed as it is, it's still the only viable option for an "open" smartphone. I've been playing around with a Pinephone lately and it's lots of fun but obviously not ready for use as a daily driver.
I use Librem 5 as a daily driver. It's much snappier than Pinephone and it's software is supported by a company unlike Pinephone relying on volunteers. It's not as good as an iPhone but usable for me.
For years, the pinephone was considered an alpha device, it was targeted for only developers to use. Currently it's considered a beta device for early adopters.
So let me give you a more apt comparison. The Libre M is like a Nissan versa, ready to drive off the lot. The pinephone is like a ebike that you have to assemble, weld and program yourself.
I have both, and today you don't have to do anything complicated with Pinephone to use it. It comes with a preinstalled OS and is usable on day one. You can even change the OS by following simple instructions to prepare the microSD card (without knowing what you're doing) and then you just use the phone, too.
> The Department of Justice’s list of solutions for fixing Google’s illegal antitrust behavior and restoring competition in the search engine market started with ... breaking off Chrome, Android, or Google Play as the DOJ’s filing considers
As JWZ put it:
"A venture capital company's fan club, finance-obsessed manchildren making the world worse"
Slightly NSFW source: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png