A fascinating thing about complex life in the deep crust lies how said life allows the earth to regenerate ecosystems even under the most extreme hypothetical conditions, and has probably done so in the past:
For example, if a super-asteroid the size of a minor planet were to hit the Earth, it's believed that it would essentially boil away all the oceans and cook the whole of the planet's atmosphere. Studies have also shown that it would likely super-heat the crust down to a depth of hundreds of meters, even in parts far from the immense and totally liquefied impact site itself.
But, in those more distant parts of the crust, far down in the dark beyond the reach of post-impact heating, below a depth of several hundred meters, microbes of all kinds would continue to live, hidden in so many tiny, watery cracks. As thousands of years pass after such a colossal impact, as the atmosphere reforms, as the earth's water re-condenses, and falls back to the surface in gigantic ocean-filling torrential rain storms, those hidden microbes, which had found their refuge in the deep rocks, would eventually creep upwards.
They'd slowly find their way back into these reformed oceans, lakes and rivers, back into the again cooled atmosphere, back into the sunlight, and the evolutionary process would kick into gear all over again.
It's speculated that our planet has survived at as many as several completely surface destroying impacts by minor planets or asteroids several hundred kilometers across, impacts that make the dinosaur impactor seem like a children's party firecracker in comparison, and this is how life regenerated from these cataclysms.
You state a great number of very alarming things with all the certainty you can muster, without mentioning that neither you or anyone else actually knows if any of these will come to pass or at least to anything like the degree you mention.
In the nicest way possible, do you have anything to add other than just saying that I and the rest of the world are wrong and insinuating that I made a claim I believe to be false?
There's a lot of uncertainty in the world, but the core claims here aren't particularly hard to understand, and it's not useful to behave otherwise. The effects of the Earth warming are already visible to exactly the degree you would expect from the current level of warming, including wet bulb events, and there's no reason to believe that of all things we don't understand how heat and water work at a macroscopic level and won't see the predicted problems.
The paradox would remain valid in my view. Even with all those stacked difficulties and plausibility levels, the galaxy alone is immense and if life of any kind were to be found, i'd argue that we should be able to see signs of sophisticated life somewhere at least, so where is it? It's still a cause for some speculation and maybe even existential worry.
The galaxy isn't really that huge. 10e11 stars. If you stack only a dozen obstacles at 10% odds of overcoming them each, you come up with advanced radio-broadcasting life being an unusual outcome for a galaxy our size. Add a few more and you can bet against another advanced civilization coinciding with us in the entire observable universe.
It would be somewhat worrisome to actually find signs of primitive extraterrestrial life because of the Fermi Paradox. Given the age of the universe, and how long it took both complex life to develop on earth and for a creature such as us to emerge from that, finding life elsewhere would beg a return to Fermi's question of "Where is everyone?" implying that something comes along and causes evolving civilizations to be exterminated before they ever show signs to their presence to the wider galaxy.
If life, even of a very primitive sort, were found, it would stand to reason that it had done so in the past and that other civilizations, possibly even many of them, had formed in our huge galaxy long ago, giving them time to develop enough to be detectable even to us, so then, where are they?
Then again of course, there are probably many, many known unknowns and unknown unknowns lurking amidst all of the above supposition.
Why the hell would this be flagged? Perfectly valid, debate-worthy and absolutely relevant in the context of many non-flagged submissions on this site. Again it would be nice if the HN admin stop letting any random orangutan flag anything they like out of their own shitty little naval-gazing ideological fixations.
Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle of this place [1]. To get a sense of how repetitive these discussions are, just look at the comments in the current thread—they could just as easily have been posted to the previous thread.
The way HN operates with respect to political stories is clear and stable, and has been for many years: some stories with political overlap are ok [2], but there isn't room on the frontpage for all of them (not even 5% of them, really). Frontpage space is the scarcest resource that exists here [3], and HN is not a current affairs site [4].
If you, or anyone, will familiarize yourselves with the explanations in these links, and then still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
> Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle of this place
This principle is applied very selectively though: The homepage has been full of insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now.
It is very hard to imagine all these submissions of announcements of products with monthly release cycles gratifying anyone's intellectual curiosity. Yet it apparently does because they can stay in the homepage for 24 hours.
But for some reason, something as unprecedented as the United States government threatening Harvard with a xenophobic ban is deemed "repetitive"?
> insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now
HN's moderation system downweights those even more regularly than we downweight (some) political posts. Here's an explanation from a few years ago, which caused quite a stir if I remember correctly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 (May 2020).
In both cases—incremental product releases on the one hand, and political news on the other—some posts still make it through through to the front page, and in both cases the users who want more of that category feel like it's unduly suppressed, while users who want less of that category feel like HN is overrun with it.
I believe the issue is the type of discussions that can damage the fabric of the website. Repetitive discussions on tech products are not good but can't damage the site. But discussions of politics can be inflammatory and repetitive inflammatory discussions could damage the site since it dampens intellectual curiosity of people overall. I'm not a moderator or anything so I don't know but that's just my guess based on what dang has said in previous comments.
A lot of repetitive discussions of tech things get moderated all the time as well, you can just email them in and the moderators sort them out. There's a lot of mod commentary on how things like releases, feature updates, 'launch week' etc are handled, one recent example
"... a huge frontpage discussion about this topic just a few days ago"
The previous discussion was about an April 11, 2025 joint letter to Harvard President Alan Garber from the Commissioner of the Federal Aquisition Service, General Services Administration, the Acting General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Acting General Counsel of the Department of Education.
Discussion of the April 11th letter occurred in stories submitted at 2025-04-14T18:40:22 and 2025-04-14T18:13:07
This discussion is about an April 16, 2025 letter to Maureen Martin at Harvard's International Office from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
This story was submitted 2025-04-17T10:42:01. Discussion of this letter on April 14th would have been impossible. It was not sent until April 16th.
As one might guess, the letters make different requests. The threatened consequences for not complying are also different.
Different letters, different senders, different recipients, different sets of requests, different types of potential consequences for noncompliance, e.g., cancelling funding versus refusing to grant student visas. Are these truly the same topic. Let the reader decide.
Is it possible the reason for these stories getting flagged is because HN users with flagging privileges do not want to them discussed. Not because of repetition but because the discussions are often low quality or offensive to them in some way.
One could argue HN routinely keeps having the same discussions about the same topics, even going so far as to allow HN users to resubmit stories for discussion. Hence, comments frequently note "past discussion".
For example, an HN Poll last year showed most HN readers who vote in polls thought "AI" was mostly hype. Comments have also suggested readers are tired of the hype. Yet they are still being forced to see/hide stories about "AI" every day on HN. Sometimes it feels like HN commenters are literally being forcefed the same tired, old topics and coaxed to repeat their same old opinions, or worse, their favourite memes, over and over again.
I am not suggesting there is anything HN can do about this problem. But I am inclined to agree with the GP comment; the current flagging behaviour mirrors the worst of HN commenting behaviour. It is a low quality, cowardly attempt at moderation that does not even seem to work. We are now consistently seeing flagged stories remain on page 1.
There is no "the" reader. There's a statistical cloud of readers with highly variant preferences.
You guys need to understand that the community is divided about these questions. I don't mean divided politically on partisan lines (though that as well), I mean divided around what sorts of topics are the best fit for the site.
There are those who feel like each letter to each government agency is a major new story that obviously deserves frontpage time; and there are those who feel like HN is overrun with this sort of thing already. Ditto for every major topic including, as you say, AI: some feel like there's too much, some feel like there's not enough.
There's no HN user, including me, who's satisfied with the balance of stories on the front page. The more passionate you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) are about a particular topic, the more it feels like the topic is being unfairly and outrageously suppressed, whether by user flags or the mods or both.
This is ultimately all coming from the fundamentals of how HN works—from its initial conditions, if you like—and those aren't likely to change. Feelings about it do uptick during times of political intensity, such as now, but the underlying phenomenon is consistent and has been for many years.
Flagging does not remove stories. It does not always result in killng them to "[dead]" status. It may not even demote stories off page 1. Flagging is not a effective solution to the submission of stories that anyone believes are inappropriate for HN, i.e., it does not stop further submissions on similar topics. They still get submitted. If anything, flagging may be a means of stopping discussion. If it works. Meanwhile "[flagged]" status was removed from this story. Discussion continues.
No disagreement. Not asking for anything to change. Just trying to understand the flagging phenomenon.
Given that there is no way to downvote a story the way that one can downvote a comment, perhaps some people use flagging as a way to "downvote" stories.
The linked discussion was on April 14th. Very few topics that narrow get two back to back megathreads on HN. Fundamentally, you're arguing this one should get three (or more) megathreads and that's a very uphill argument because it runs against the basic design fabric of the place.
NB. "The reader" is a figure of speech refering to the reader who is reading the comment, whomever that may be. The point of the comment is that "repetition" is probably not an adequate explanation for flagging. Unless readers are informed who is flaggging and for what purpose, then all anyone can do is guess. No one knows why stories are flagged except the people who flag them.
Whether some HN practice has always been the case or whether it will remain so for all time is irrelevant. What's relevant is that aggressive flagging is happening now. Commenters share their thoughts about it. Some disagree. Some agree. Discussion continues.
The point of the comment is that "repetition" is probably not an adequate explanation for flagging. [...] What's relevant is that aggressive flagging is happening now.
Why not? Why does only the flagging need to be explained but not, say, the aggressive reposting of stories that are typically, and by long-established practice, offtopic for HN? These are clearly two sides of the same phenomenon, it's not obvious that the flagging alone here should be treated as some sort of anomaly.
Oh, I found /active just recently. And turned out many, if not most, interesting topics are censored. While some mediocre and irrelevant things are not. However, I’m not surprised, being a long time visitor, and seeing very dang questionable moderation practices.
HN user-driven moderation, as far as I can see, basically assumes good intent. This is, ah, naive; totally failed system. It's rather easy for any motivated group to censor anything.
There's no "non-political rule", as you'll see if you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and in fact HN hosted a huge frontpage thread about this issue just a few days ago:
You guys should familiarize yourselves with how this site is operated, because it has been explained endlessly (to the limit of my patience, in fact) over many years, and the assumptions you're making do not match reality. If you want to do that, you'll find entrypoints into thousands of past explanations in my comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724590.
> This site is owned by ycombinator, who have a motivation to "not rock the boat"…
I’d argue that leadership of ycombinator is glad where this boat is sailing. Just look who are they inviting to advertised AI startup school at the bottom of this site.
The founder of Gumroad works inside DOGE now. One of the founders of AirBNB works inside DOGE now. Musk founded DOGE. Peter Thiel's Palantir is generating the information for ICE now.
Some further context for anyone who reads this and thinks it's a factual or plausible summation of the factors that influence HN moderation:
- Gumroad is not a YC-funded company and its founder has no influence on YC or HN.
- Joe Gebbia is just one of more than ten thousand YC-backed founders and does not represent YC or influence HN.
- Of the other people named, none has any official role or influence at YC, and only one of them has ever had a formal role; a brief, minor role that ended over seven years ago. At least two of those named have had very public, bitterly hostile disputes with former presidents of YC and founders of notable YC companies.
- The only person with any role/influence at YC who publicly espouses any position on U.S. federal politics is Paul Graham, who tweets almost daily in staunch opposition to the current U.S. administration.
- HN moderators and YC management know that HN is only valuable if it is a place where people can find content and discussions that engage intellectual curiosity, and the surest way to destroy its value is to allow it to be captured by any political or ideological agenda.
Paul Graham is actively discouraging people from working for Palantir if it is building technology that helps the government violate the U.S. constitution:
I doubt they need to adjust the algorithim though to get rid of politics heavy posts specifically.
I’m pretty sure anything that gets more than twice as many comments than upvotes gets a huge downrank penalty, such that they would almost never hit the front page without moderator intervention.
I didn't mention Nazism, I said _fascist salute_. The fascist movement that was popular earlier in the 20th century and led to Nazism, but is not exclusively limited to it. The adoption of the "Roman" salute was from Italian fascism, which the Germans borrowed.
I agree, and there’s plenty of political discussion here. E.g. Navalny’s death / murder was discussed wildly here, but is completely irrelevant to tech. (If this resource pretends it’s about tech.) Politics is ok, unless it’s politics we don’t like you to talk about.
They did not. Very specifically, only flagged articles are the ones that paint current president or current republican leadership very badly while going into details.
That is only flagged kind of article. Other political articles are fine.
Decision to be non political would lead to different selection of articles to be banned.
If things like these happen, staying silent is — guess what — political.
If your neighbours are being taken away by state police there is no non-political move you can make. Helping the police is political, ducking away and pretending it is not helping is political and hiding them is political as well.
While I understand that this site tries to not drown in the flaming garbage site that online political discourse can be, if I — the exact demographic who startups would like to have working for them would list precisely this as my main concern stopping me from moving into the US it is a bit odd that it is verboten to discuss it.
Hackers historically were (and are) extremely critical of authority and for the freedom of knowledge, and now we can't discuss an direct attack at those very values on a site that calls itself Hackernews? Come on.
Please find a way to contribute more politely to HN. Regardless of whether I agree with you on whether this post should be flagged, calling your fellow HNers "random orangutans" that act out of "shitty little naval-gazing ideological fixations" is rude, mean, stupid, and wrong.
I'll be honest, I prefer it this way. Thanks people flagging the political stuff (I can't be bothered).
If you want the political stuff & the controversial stuff, you can add /active after the URL to HN main page.
The fact that there is an /active tab and flagged submissions can still be voted & commented on, tells me that while dang don't want it to be the face of HN, he's fine that people discuss it (as long as you comment with civility). If there was some tinfoil conspiracy, the tab would've been deleted.
I'm guilty that l now usually check /active and main page.
You know, some of the high-horse, HN readers are quick to say "social media, bad" and anything bashing social media (including blogs) sky rocket up to main page. "reddit sucks" is another common one. I mean I usually agree to that sentiment, but if you check /active posts, the comments, where things go, it resembles any other social media slop more than HN.
I spend more time on /active, sadly. Maybe those navel-gazing orangutans are actually the ones making sure this is not reddit or Facebook for techies rather than boomers
I flag American politics because it's boring and irrelevant to me. Nothing to do with ideological fixations, although it does please me that people like get so worked up about it.
> I flag American politics because it's boring and irrelevant to me.
Where on earth could you live that American politics are irrelevant to you? Boring sure, but irrelevant? Unless you live, well, on Jupiter these days, there's not an inch of the globe that's untouched by the effects of American politics.
This complaint went out the window when they started pulling all of their actions straight from the Nazi playbook.
Just because someone coined a law on the internet decades ago does not invalidate the comparison. Neither does you finding it repetitive and boring. If anything, you should be more concerned, not apathetic.
Anyone who uses such a thing to "communicate" with mom & pop fully deserves to be disowned. This is even worse than just not calling at all.. Grotesque
>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life
You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our ability and follow this up with the launch of all our nuclear weapons everywhere in the world, and we'd kill ourselves off (or at least enough of us to no longer be able to continue our destruction efforts in a meaningful way) long before we'd more than pull off a tiny fraction of the destruction one large asteroid causes.
And no, we wouldn't at all ruin the Earth's ability to sustain life. Our planet and its ability to regenerate ecosystems has survived multiple impacts my massive asteroids, at least a couple of impacts by literal small planets, at least two total ice ages in which the planet turned into an essential snowball (think ice caps from pole to pole) and at least three massive magmatic events (that I can think of off the top of my head) spanning whole subcontinents worth of lava flow and multiple massive volcanoes erupting constantly, without pause, for hundreds of thousands of years, only for life to bounce back from all of this.
It's pure ignorant hubris to think that any human effort today could come close.
I agree that, obviously, large scale asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms have exponentially bigger immediate destructive outcomes. Ridiculously so.
That doesn't mean the atmosphere itself, and the weather systems governing them, don't have to be kept in balance from the inside. It's a different kind of threat, man-made effects on the planet, sustained and over time. Two different systems – one where the life-sustaining systems suffer an acute disruption but then can naturally restore itself over time, and another where the nature of the system itself could slowly be adjusted, potentially compromising its basic life-sustaining qualities.
I wouldn't say it's a bigger threat than large asteroid impacts or cataclysmic events – though, those are relatively minuscule percentages, where the other is something approaching 100% on our current trajectory –, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a threat in itself to the planet's life-sustaining properties. Every threat merits attention, regardless of how they compare.
And the threat is not about human effort, it's about ignorant human hubris.
>because they all come from a pre-exploited era of tech with the underlying subtext that humanity is unified in wanting tech to be used for good purposes.
That's the problem with being nostalgic for something you possibly didn't even live. You don't remember all the other ugly complexities that don't fit your idealized vision.
Nothing about the world of the sci fi golden age was less exploitative or prone to human misery than it is today. If anything, it was far worse than what we have today in many ways (excluding perhaps the reach of the surveillance state)
Some of the US government's worst secret experiments against the population come from that same time and the naive faith by the population in their "leaders" made propaganda by centralized big media outlets all the more pervasively powerful. At the same time, social miseries were common and so too were many strictures against many more people on economic and social opportunities. As for technology being used for good purposes, bear in mind that among many other nasty things being done, the 50's and 60s were a time in which several governments flagrantly tested thousands of nukes out in the open, in the skies, above-ground and in the oceans with hardly a care in the world or any serious public scrutiny. If you're looking at that gone world with rose-tinted glasses, I'd suggest instead using rose tinted welding goggles..
The world of today may be full of flaws, but the avenues for breaking away from controlled narratives and controlled economic rules are probably broader than they've ever been.
You are entirely right to call me out on that. But I would like to say that sci fi that applied to computers, AI, automation, were just dreams of a different world, because those technologies hadn’t been exploited yet. Even many of the dystopias feel innocent with today’s knowledge of where it went. Such as 1984, imo.
>But I would like to say that sci fi that applied to computers, AI, automation, were just dreams of a different world, because those technologies hadn’t been exploited yet. Even many of the dystopias feel innocent with today’s knowledge of where it went. Such as 1984, imo.
On this I definitely agree, especially on the last part. Specifically, when I read the science fiction of previous decades, and see how its descriptions of a surveillance state compare to the surveillance capacities that literally get applied today by so many states (with varying degrees of authoritarianism), the old sci fi seems absurdly quaint.
But then maybe it's bad at this too, and simply lies to you....
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