I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open source (as you could guess from my profile, that’s a topic dear to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my life.
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email [email protected], and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
I can't remember virtually anything - this is not a joke - having one's brain be sandblasted by the firehose every day turns memory into a dodgy thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). I believe there have been some, though not as many. That's largely a function of the submission feed, i.e. which articles the community submits, upvotes, or flags. All we can do is respond case-by-case, and we try to do that in a principled way. The principles we apply (or try to) have been explained many times and can be found via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and links from those comments.
If you feel like the submission feed and/or the moderation decisions on top of it are biased, all I can tell you is that everyone feels that way, especially on any topic they are passionate about. You needn't look far for examples of commenters complaining that we're suppressing and censoring the Gaza story - there are some in this thread.
What I feel a lot more confident talking about, in terms of balanced moderation, is the comments. We've moderated, warned, and banned many accounts for breaking the site guidelines while posting anti-Israeli (and sometimes even anti-semitic) comments, and we'll continue to do that. That's something we take very seriously, and of course, we do the same the other way round as well.
Thanks for the answer (and what seems to be unflagging the comment). Having some experience moderating (of course, much smaller) communities I understand it's impossible to keep everyone satisfied.
I, of course, can't judge the intent or the effort. What I can say is that I read all captions of 150+ votes submission, rarely skipping any, and I saw 20+ pro-Palestine ones and zero pro-Israeli ones. I think this is quite objective measure.
At some point I thought it might be intentional but now I think it is just bias amplification: these submission are flagged too fast and upvoted too slow to get anywhere.
Coincidentally, I just used hn.algolia to look up one of your old comments where you describe being sandblasted, and was surprised to find the most recent use of "sandblasted" on HN is by you, linking to an algolia search of you saying "sandblasted".
Thank you sincerely for your sacrifice, Dan. Whenever I have an urge to flame, I picture my impending comment as one more grain of sand speeding towards your cranium, and instead I step away from the keyboard.
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2.
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
It might not be the most substantive comment ever made. But by now it is about as classic as the Stephen Colbert quote ”reality has a well-known liberal bias”, and I bet you would not consider that quote hateful near-bannable offence, versus Republicans, right? It follows the exact pattern, and has a similar connotation. There is a large contingency in power in Israel and the west who loudly considers the truth to be antisemitism. Therefore we have a duty (BECAUSE ALL OTHER WAYS HAVE CLEARLY FAILED) as human beings to mock them. And what better way to mock them (like a court jester) than to use their words against them?
There are others here who would strongly disagree with this view, or the other views expressed on here. Personally, I was startled by the post in question, even as I wondered what was actually meant by it. We all have to coexist on here.
Were you more or less startled by reading it here or hearing those words from the mouth of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security since 2022?
Here's a tip I learned the hard way: you can't assume that other commenters have seen or heard the same things that you have; and when they have, you can't assume that they have the same subset in working memory.
As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty.
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time.
You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason.
There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime.
Most soldiers who disagreed with the Nazi left the Wehrmacht by 38 (or were pushed out, or were beaten and restrained for month in 'black site', often disaffected warehouses where socialists and Communist were 'retrained', basically proto-concentration camps).
In 42-43 some were reintegrated forcefully, and those I agree do not bear responsibility for the Wehrmacht war crimes.
My grandmother had a lot of stories about the Wehrmacht and was very disappointed that they were basically whitewashed from their pedophilic rapes, public executions and other group punishment.
Zionism is the idea of self determination of Jews in their homeland. You separate Jews from zionists. How would you call the Palestinian self determination movement, would you separate it from the rest of the Palestinians? Would you call that group for committing war crimes?
That‘s just two flavors of nationalism, an outdated idea from last couple of centuries that leads nowhere. The only reasonable way is federalism and deep political integration, where Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, maybe Jordan build a common state with free trade, free movement etc. That may sound a distant future at best, but the alternative is the same bloody status quo.
I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith.
Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear.
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them.
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
bolt is quite smooth experience anywhere in north europe, not sure why you had such a haunted experience. haven't been in riga airport though, in the city it was fine..
Your use-cases are hardly average. I don't think I ever encountered 150MB image or folder with 300 videos. I don't even use nautilus outside of the very niche cases. I'm using Chromium or Terminal or VScode or Idea 99% of time. My GNOME is just a shell switching windows. Whatever file managers, image viewers or other stuff bundled with GNOME matters little for me, I can easily replace them. I don't even understand the concept of DE, this is just wasted work to maintain those apps. They even develop their own browser...
A computer should have no problems at all dealing with a 150MB image or 300 videos. I'm invoking cmuratori here. What do you think you are getting out of running defense for objectively broken/unusable software?
regardless of what people complain of, firefox is still an awesome daily driver. nobody likes the direction the MF is taking the browser to but at least we can influence it, unlike google.
It also works flawlessly on Android, with uBlock Origin blocking everything, including ads on youtube (provided one stays in the browser of course, and not use the app).
Best thing we can do to influence it is probably to use and fund forks such as LibreWolf, hoping that they are in a position to continue development once Google decides to tell the manager of Mozilla to finally destroy it completely.
(Yes, that is a joke I hope, but if I compare what I think a puppet controlled by Google would do to destroy the Mozilla brand to what Mozillas CEO has been doing, I think there is a lot of similarities.)
Thinking that funding forks, like LibreWolf, would save said forks from dying if Mozilla goes under, is naive.
The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year. Estimates for Chrome range from 1 to 2 billion $ per year. In other words, take the donations of something like Wikimedia, which is arguably very successful in asking for donations, and you'd still be very short on the money needed to fund a web browser. And if you bring those costs down to something more manageable, like say, 100 million $, and assuming you can convince people to donate (IMO, when pigs will fly), then you'll have a browser that may be completely unable to compete with Chromium.
All the browser “forks” survive because Google and Mozilla are doing the hard work.
> The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year.
Are you sure that USD 500 million goes into the development of Firefox each year?
Or does it go to funding of questionable Mozilla Foundation projects?
Admittedly, I have not checked the numbers recently but last I looked into it I got the impression that Firefox development was an embarrassingly small amount of what Mozilla spends their money on.
> The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year.
Half a billion, IIRC, is what Mozilla gets from Google every year. This is AFAIK mostly not spent on developing the browser.
To add insult to injury AFAIK it arrives through Mozilla corporation (which develops the browser) and is then funneled through to the foundation to be spent on "initiatives".
I'm not responsible for whatever tone you put on my post in your internal monologue's voice.
Being starkly the only one who points out how weird it is that there was no reason for why would even want to consider this offer, and the unappealing rules for which this is controlled -- its a weird endeavor for this town, and weird post for HN.
Is stating such lacking of manners? Or are emotional triggers > discussion of the content posted?
@Debo - I was talking about the content of the freaking Cumberland website and their offer.
Whatever - defend this absolutely atrocious offer, my comment being downvoted doesnt make the offer any better, nor it presentation.
Can I do up working and get paid in crypto? Because bank accounts for Iranians is something that may get frozen any minute. Like actually any minute. Has happened to other people multiple times in past years
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
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